Keeb's Quest

I want to create a touch-typing game for my kids.

There are some really great existing touch-typing tutor programs out there on the Web. But I find that they mostly fall into one of these broad categories:

The rewards and punishments of these games are blunt instruments.

Contrast this with how I learned to touch-type in high school. We copied exercises (home-row letters, the rest of the letters, words, paragraphs, pages modeled after old-school business documents) from paper print-outs into WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS on "IBM-compatible PCs". You sat there and typed until the page was copied.

There was an intrinsic reward for speed and proficiency: you could finish the boring exercise sooner and stop doing it!

Another kind of intrinsic reward is the kind you get from playing a great game: being able to advance a story, solve a puzzle, and/or interact with a dynamic world.

Thus Keeb’s Quest.

I’d like to make a game that uses text to interact, like an classical text-based adventure, but with emphasis on learning they keyboard and with a heavy dose of meta-humor about the absurdity of interacting this way.

The natural reward for learning to touch-type quickly and accurately will be the ability to quickly and accurately advance the story and interact with the world.

This will be my development log and playground. I’d like to make a blog-like series of it.