Type Swap is a crossover between typing trainer and match-3 and adds fun and motivation to your typing practice. Reach new high scores by increasing typing accuracy and speed as well as enhancing your matching skills.
If you like the Type Swap, please consider helping me to make it a success. Ways to do so include, but are not limited to, leaving a nice comment or constructive feedback here or on discord, telling your friends about the game or paying for it.
Disclaimer
Purchase for current state (early access)May not be appropriate for childrenDoes not teach touch-typing
Find further details about the individual points in the section Detailed Disclaimer below.
Features
Core gameplay: Type the words on neighbouring blocks to swap them. Create lines of matching blocks by swapping to destroy blocks and score.Progress through 6 levels: Unlock upper case characters, numbers, and symbolsOnline & Local Highscores (favours typing correctness over typing speed, match-3 skill and luck)Lifelike & extensive pool of wordsSupported Languages: English, GermanExperimental: Spanish, Italian, French Highly Experimental: Russian
Possible future features
If a community forms around the game, I will try to add new features. The following list gives you a glimpse of the ideas I have for future development:
Better Long-term motivation:More levelsStatistics about your training progressCustom levels (e.g. custom word pool, custom duration)Unlocks to customize the aestheticsFriends-only LeaderboardsDaily challengesAchievementsIncreased Training-Effect:Optimize word selection for increased impact on overall typing speed (i.e. focus on error-prone or slow words)Generate personal short-term goals based on your recent performance, drawing on insights about typing improvements from the whole player baseTouch-Type-Teaching modeAdditional polish:A better fontSupport for more languages & better translationsCommunity suggestions:Please share your ideas on discord or the discussion board
Detailed Disclaimer
Purchase for current state (early access)
The core gameplay works well, and the game is as polished as it gets without buying external help. The feature set is limited but well-rounded.
As this is a side project, I may or may not invest more time and money to add features or polish. The probability of further investment rises with community interest and feedback, so please get in touch if you have feedback.
May not be appropriate for children
The word pool contains some explicit words, which were automatically extracted from large bodies of text.
Does not teach touch-typing
The game aims to improve your existing typing skills, as it does not contain a touch-typing tutorial.
There are many great resources if you are looking for a touch-typing tutorial. Some examples of those are listed here: https://beebom.com/typing-software/.
I can’t recommend any tools for learning the basics personally, as I learned touch-typing decades ago. Thus, I have not taken the time to evaluate the currently available tools in detail.
For switching to a non-standard keyboard layout (which involves a lot of re-learning), I found the following tools very helpful:
https://www.keybr.com/ is a free online tool designed for (re)learning to type on a non-standard keyboard layout. Instead of the typical typing drills based on letter placement on the QWERTY keyboard, it introduces letters one by one from common to uncommon. The introduction speed is based on your typing proficiency with the current set of letters. keybr has helped me get back up to speed after switching keyboard layouts.https://monkeytype.com/ is a free online tool for typing practice. It has tons of options that allow you to shape your typing practice precisely to your liking. Additionally, it features a rich set of statistics to keep you motivated.