Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko

How good are you at typing? Lets put your speed and accuracy to the test! Typefarmer is an arcade style typing game where you harvest crops by typing the word associated with it. Though speed is important, typing accurately is the key to scoring high. And the scoring even has a multiplier system that leaves some room for strategising too. How high of a spot can you claim on the online leaderboards?
🎮🕹️ Download or play online on itch.io 🕹️🎮

🛠️ Tools used
- Unity 2021.3.8
- JetBrains Rider 2022.3
- Logic Pro X
- Inkscape
- Gimp
🎞️ Gameplay video
⏰ Dev timelapse
🖥️ Screenshots

Ratings
| Overall | 24th | 4.092⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 43th | 3.929⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 215th | 3.163⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 98th | 3.939⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 47th | 4.153⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 16th | 4.102⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 91th | 3.266⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 69th | 3.777⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 51🗨️ |
@kristinamay It doesn't really lock to a word you're typing. So you could technically even correctly fill some tiny word while writing some longer one.

And there should be no distance limitation at all. My guess would be that you just saw the word wrong in those cases. There are a lot of weird words that by a glance look like common ones. 😅 Or another reason is similar to the what is shown in the above gif. If the word you're remembering and trying to type starts with the same letter(s) as the previously typed ended, then typing the first letter again will fail it.
I managed to get 6th place so far :smile:

That character that wanders around to harvest the crops after you finish typing is really cool. The game would have probably worked even without that, but it adds so much to the overall feeling.
I noticed that sometimes the last letter that you type as part of the word is also being highlighted as the initial of a different word. I saw the comment from @kristinamay and it doesn't really look like it is just a smaller word contained in a longer one. It really looks like the last letter you type is also becoming the first of a different word, but not all the time.
Taking into account speed and accuracy and having multipliers was a good choice. I am pretty sure it would have become repetitive and not so entertaining if you only had speed in mind. Nicely done!
I played the web version and I can tell you that from a non-native English speaker, the scrolling that happens while the character is moving around is making it really hard to read some words. "C" and "G" can be easily confused due to the scrolling that is not smooth and some of the words well... I didn't even know them so either I learned some new terms or you have some nonsense words in your dictionary :smile:
As much as I like the music, it gets boring after a while. I believe that's mainly because it is a short loop with a fast bpm.
The "any key" is literally ANY... when I wanted to take a screenshot of the leaderboard I had to switch to the app I use to take screenshots using the mouse as pressing alt-tab would start the game :smile:
Overall I believe you already have one of the top entries here, well done!
I'm a non-native English speaker too and didn't face any major issues with those. Of course there are loads of uncommon and weird words in the dictionary and quite often at a quick glance you will mistake something for some other more common similar "looking" word.
Well it's not that "any" really. It also ignores mouse click and left/right and A/D 😅
I saw some words in other languages besides english, so I'm curious how the game is generating its internal dictionary to spawn words.
Anyway, I managed to snag the 6th place, let's see how long it lasts!

https://github.com/anttihaavikko/typefarmer/blob/main/Assets/Misc/enwords.txt
@fancyreckless Haha yeah that's how the game also kinda happened. Started off with no great ideas on what to make so I started making a typing game. But when I made the camera follow the player and having the player be the origin of spawning new plants was when it clicked to me that this could be kinda fun and interesting. Then I piled on on that aspect and added the distance based score bonus etc.

My only gripe is that failing a word resets the word fully _even if the mistyped letter was the first letter of the word_. Using the example from the previous comments, if you have the words CAR and RAM, the fastest way to type them would obviously be C-A-R-A-M. In my opinion, also C-A-R-R-A-M should be acceptable, but currently typing C-A-R-R will fail RAM and reset it fully, which results to you having to retype the first R again. So, you actually have to type C-A-R-R-R-A-M.
This is obviously a super tiny detail, but I found myself making this mistake multiple times. I couldn't just type words I saw on the screen but I had to actually think if the previous word ended with the same letter(s) as the next one. In the later stages of the game when the going got hectic this actually added a fair bit of cognitive load that I felt unnecessary and it slowed me down considerably. That goes doubly for when there were multiple shared letters.
Yeah I actually kept failing on that same "trap" while I was playing it too. But stubbornly kept it like that thinking that it makes the scoring more interesting. Which I still think it does but hope it doesn't make it too bad in contrast.
This was a really interesting take on the normal typing game formula. The movement of the little farmer guy meant that there was a bit of strategy to the order and positioning of the words you type. I will say I had the same quibble as @juutis and others about typing the first letter of a word that you happened to get from a previous word is penalized. Other than that it played very smoothly and the bouncy animations and bits of polish really brought it to life.
I will say this felt a little bit smaller scoped than some of your previous compo games. It would have been neat if there were upgrades or some other secondary mechanic to add some extra depth. But of course 48 hours is not very long and you already have a ridiculous amount of polish, a solid core mechanic, and *online high scores,* so it's hard to complain about scope all things considered.
Great work on this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!

Dang, just now I actually misspelled reaper and found out a way to combine both, Grim Rea**pear**. 😜🍐
The only issue I had was when I was running long distances and things spawned "near" the edge and I missed the word because I'm slow. And sometimes I couldn't get back to those words.
Other than that, wonderful experience :D

Lovely game, the graphics did what it have to do, the music was catchy and a bop (albeit slightly repetitive), and I do love myself some typing games. Some words had me confused haha, interesting choices of words at times! The one issue I ran into is that sometimes it would consider me typing the first letter of a word while I was still in the middle of another word, but keeping my eyes open on the visuals helped me out there!
Thanks for the submission!
Great game @antti-haavikko !

What are your thoughts on zooming out camera a bit when you have bigger streak going, so you can queue in more words? (Unless this is already happening, I am not that fast of typer)
So far my preferred strategy was:
1. remember one word at one side of screen;
2. type another word at the other side of screen;
3. type-in word in memory (step 1), scan for new word type in step 2, so will be at max distance from word in step 1;
4. repeat step 3..
The only problem, is if I fail one of the words, I will be left in place with no words for some time. And I can't type I have in memory, because of some their weird spelling :joy:
Other than that - another great entry :thumbsup:
And nicely kinda randomly found out that some weird words or spellings sooner or later come up and mess up your streak. That's the fun of having a huge dictionary with some weird monstrous words in there.
Thanks for the feedback! ❤️
The game is clean and polished. The looks are nice and the music is great, it doesn't get old too quick. Gameplay-wise I think I agree that zooming out might be nice, although I do also like the "strategy" of remembering words so that you can ping-pong for max distance bonuses. Still, you could do this by consciously choosing words that are far from each other when you can still see them :) It does suck a bit that you cannot see words which are filling up your overgrowth bar, maybe you could just control the farmer to move that way? The score popups that show whenever you harvest a word are nice but occasionally they get in the way of other words that I would like to see. Likewise I think words which were already typed (yellow) could be made smaller to reduce visual noise.
Oh, another thing that I think should be changed: if I already typed the first letter of a word, then type that same letter again, it cancels the progress on that word completely. So, I have to type that first letter for a *third* time, then continue writing the rest of the word. This is especially annoying when I "accidentally" start writing a word because it starts with the same letter as the last letter of the previous word. Since I am still typing that last word in auto-pilot I don't really want to think of the shared letter(s) as I am selcting the next word to type on screen.
Apart from that the game is great, simple yet really polished and fine tuned to make it a great experience!
I found that I ended up with quite a few plants offscreen that were hard to get back to. I guess it was a matter of which plants I choose to harvest first and the direction they were taking me.
Great stuff!

I like the fact that the systems are quite simple in the end; there are bonuses but not for speed and accuracy as one might think. The speed is only important to keep the number of crops down, and accuracy is to not lose your multiplier pointlessly by "wasting" letters without clearing words. So in the end you really only have to care about the overgrowth and your multiplier and that's where the strategy lies. It encourages you to wait for more words to appear so you can plan ahead, but not too much... I don't think I've done that a lot to get my 160k score (still wondering how that happened) but it's wickedly smart, congrats!
Some of the strange words really tripped me up, the first time I saw them, though. Interesting choices. 😅
leaderboard, beware, i'm coming


Not the first typing game I've played but I usually like them 😁 One thing that tripped me up a few times is how the final letter of a finished word seems to count as the first letter of another while I expected it to reset after I finished a word. It's probably actually a nice feature to get more words down faster tho, so long as you're aware of it.
I'm just grasping for straws to provide any kind of helpful criticisms tho. This was super well done!!
I think I'm going to take a gander at the source to see how you did that font wave effect... I'd like to steal it 😂.
https://github.com/anttihaavikko/typefarmer/blob/main/Assets/AnttiStarterKit/Animations/WobblingText.cs
@ava-skoog Thanks for the feedback! ❤️ Yea I guess having some light vegetation and more irregularity on the ground coloring would help with the emptiness. The end and next word start matching was indeed intended as a scoring mechanic but it seems to trip people up quit a lot. Very surprised that no one has recognized those barks yet. 🤔 Maybe Tetris Attack wasn't such a big hit that people have those sound effects engraved to their brain like I do. And I guess it was a while ago too...