I Made a Game!

...and forgot to tell anyone about it. Well, perhaps more accurately, I made a demo of a game, and forgot to tell anyone about it. Well, perhaps even more accurately, I made a demo of a game, told everyone I came across about it, but forgot to make a blog post. Yeah, that about covers it.

So here we are! I proudly present (the demo for) Tomb Typer, a rogue-lite typing game. Excitingly, it might be the first (or second!) rogue-lite typing games to ever exist! Turns out typing games are quite niche. Who'd have thunk?

Intro screen for Tomb Typer. To proceed in the menu, you need to actually type out the words, which I thought was clever. :-)

I'd have thunk! I personally particularly enjoy typing games, and I've always wanted to make one. Paired with my love for rogue-lites, the idea for Tomb Typer was born. Go ahead, give it a try!

In the game, you have to traverse multiple waves of undead enemies to reach the end. You can damage the enemy by correctly typing the word displayed beneath them. Each enemy has a difficulty class, and randomly cycles through a list of thematic words. For instance, skeletons can show "dead", "elbow", "femur", "joint", ... . Once a word has been typed correctly, you deal damage calculated based on the number of vowels and consonants typed, and some other multiplication factors. Succesfully killing an enemy will land you some money, which you can use to buy upgrades once a wave is over, such as increasing consonant damage, unlocking new skills such as the wave, or regaining some health.

Screenshot of the first level.

Tomb Typer is made in Godot, which is a lovely engine to work with. I don't have a lot of experience in other game engines to compare against (except Game Maker from back when I was 12), but I was quite pleased with the overall experience. More and more commercial games are being developed using Godot, and I fully understand why.

What's next for Tomb Typer, you might be wondering? Well, no idea. I had a lot of great plans at one point, but so far I've only managed to add it to my list of "To Do's". Realistically, I won't work any further on the game. :/

There's a twist, however: some of my students found out about the game, and apparently really enjoyed themselves! I mentioned the game wasn't actively being continued, and offhandly mentioned that I'd be willing to share the source code for them to tinker with. The day after I had a mail in my inbox requesting the project code! So, who knows? It'll take some crawling through my spaghetti code, but they might be able to continue development on the game. If anything comes out of it, I'll be sure to update this page. :-)

(As an aside, 8 months ago I also made a small game in the PICO-8 engine, which I'm hoping to share soon through a blog post.)