Competitive Typoe Annihilation
Competitive Typoe Annihiliation, also referred to with codename typo13k, was an online game made for js13kGames 2016 game jam.
Initially hosted on Heroku, the game is now available on Glitch.
Gameplay
The player picks their nickname and joins the global room. The server dispenses a puzzle – a word where two consecutive letters are swapped. The fastest player to correct the word on their computer gets 1 point. The game keeps a leaderboard.
Implementation details
The game jam’s rules required the game to use NodeJS on the backend and socket.io for communicating with the server. The game picks words at random from the nouns list from Darius Kazemi’s corpora
Awards
The game received 3rd place in the Server category of js13kGames 2016, with two positive feedback notes from judges, however Jupiter Hadley noted that the word losing a round while typing caused the player to type into the new word they were supposed to start solving.
Problems that could use solving
- The problem of clobbering new word when losing a round while still typing remains unsolved.
- Players are identified by their socket ID, so when they reconnect, they effectively lose their leaderboard place.
- Players with the same nickname are indistinguishable on the leaderboard.
- There is no authentication system.
- There is one global room, so you can’t have a private game with a friend.
- The game could lead a very competitive player to strain their carpal tunnel.