ABOUT

A typing game that measures your hands

KEYSTORM is a free typing game you play in a browser. Words fall towards you as enemy ships and typing them destroys them. That part is not new; the genre is twenty years old. What is different is what happens after the run ends.

Why it exists

Typing games are good at making practice bearable and bad at telling you anything. You finish a run, you get a score, and you learn nothing about your own typing. The score climbs over weeks, which tells you that you improved but not where, and not what to do next.

So alongside the score, the game keeps a separate record for each of the twenty-six letters: how often you found it, how often you missed, and the delay before your finger arrived. Afterwards that becomes a picture of your own keyboard with the worst letters marked, and a drill built from those letters alone.

Getting faster at typing mostly comes down to knowing which four keys cause most of your errors, and almost nobody can name theirs.

What is in it

• Four difficultiesFrom five lives down to a single one, and on the hardest setting a typo releases the ship you were halfway through.
• A daily challengeSeeded from the date, so everyone playing today gets the identical run. The only variable is your hands.
• Co-op and versusUp to three players sharing one battlefield, or on separate fields sending enemies at each other.
• Seven enemy typesSprinters, splitters, armoured hulls, divers that speed up when ignored, and shielded bosses.
• Three word listsClassic, programming vocabulary, or the words English uses most.
• A key reportPer-key accuracy and reaction time, kept across every run.

How it is built

The game itself uses no image files. Every ship, explosion, menu and the sky is drawn with code on an HTML canvas. The interface sounds are synthesised in the browser as they play. The music and the main sound effects are recordings, loaded after your first key press, and if one fails to load the game falls back to a synthesised version.

That started as a constraint and turned out to be the right call. The game code is about 200KB, so it starts quickly on a slow connection, and it scales to any screen without blurring. It has five colour themes because a theme is a handful of numbers rather than a folder of redrawn art.

It is written in TypeScript. The multiplayer server runs the same rules code the browser does, so there is one implementation of the game rather than two that drift apart. All randomness comes from a seeded generator, which is what makes the daily challenge identical for every player and every versus field fair.

Who makes it

My name is Hiren Solanki. I build software, I wrote KEYSTORM on my own, and I am the person who maintains it. It is published under Script Veda Innovations, which is the name I release my own projects under. There is no team behind this and no company backing it.

The reason it exists is the one above: I wanted to know which keys were actually slowing me down, and no typing game would tell me. Scores go up over weeks and that is all you learn from them. Measuring each key separately was the part I wanted, and the game is what makes the measurement bearable to collect.

I work on it in my own time and it is not finished, so things change. If something is broken, or you want to tell me the game is too hard, I read everything that comes to the contact page.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no tier that does cost anything. You are not asked to register, confirm an address or install a file, because none of those would make the game better. Scores and key statistics stay in your browser and are never uploaded. Advertising pays for it, which is why a wide screen shows units beside the board. Those sit in their own columns of the page layout, so one can never overlap the field or move it while you play.

If you want the specifics of what is stored and what third parties are involved, the privacy page lists all of it.

Credits

The music is Outer Space Loop by wipics, from OpenGameArt.org, released under CC0. Everything else you see and hear was made for this game.