In January 2024 I picked up Godot for the first time and started working on a typing game project. I didn’t yet have a name and simply called it “type2.”

The idea has been brewing for a while because after doing some typing practice on a new keyboard last year I wasn’t happy with the options I had in the typing trainers. They all either had a set of disconnected words or short texts, but I wanted more than that, and preferably offline.

I spent most of the time putting the basics in place and getting the data structures right, so that I could automate text layout and didn’t need to do anything by hand. However, my data converter has not been ready by the time of the first playtest demo and the text you see below has been set up entirely by hand.

A core defining feature of the project is what I call “overtype.” It’s a mechanism/UI where you would see text with typographic or otherwise non-plain symbols like “æ” in “Romæ” but you will type a replacement, in this case “ae”. This way I can have pretty, well-formatted text but allow the player to press only the basic keys.

Below is a screenshot of the first playtest demo I did on February 1st, 2024. It is very much not reflecting the finished gameplay.

Demo 01/02/2024

And here’s a video of the same demo: