Custom Key Clash

Inspiration

Everyone loves doing a typing speed test and comparing your speed again your friends, but the standard querty keyboard has not changed for years so there is not much new to learn. I thought it would be fun to test how well people can learn to use a new keyboard day to day.

What it does

Custom Key Clash gives the player an 8 letter keyboard that can either be clicked directly (typical for mobile players) or keyboard numbers can be used as a proxy (typical for desktop players).

The player uses this keyboard type out three stages of increasingly longer words as fast as they can.

How we built it

I built this using the new beta version of GameMaker that can sync with devvit and deploy games to reddit. I used GameMaker for making the game start to finish including using the built in tools to make the sprites.

Challenges we ran into

Making the actual game was pretty smooth since I have used GameMaker before.

The most challenging part was getting the high score board to work. Getting the game to properly call the reddit APIs correctly proved weirdly challenging. I eventually found some samples online that that solved my issue, but it felt unnatural to make calls to reddit from within GameMaker since usually I use it as a tool for self contained games that don't connect to a server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I got this together in a week since I found this hackathon late and I think the gameplay loop is pretty good and a nice setup for a daily game.

What we learned

The process of publishing a game and testing directly in the private subreddit was really smooth and encourages me to work with the devvit platform more in the future.

What's next for Custom Key Clash

Right now there are a few features that are reddit platform specific I would would to smooth out and then make the game public.

I have seen some other games have a base game that makes new post creation really easy. I want to add a game flow that allows users to pick a keyboard and the words that need to be typed and make a new post with that, but I ran out of time trying to get the high score board to work

Built With

• gamemaker