Glyphica: Typing Survival News

Hello Survival Typists,

Glyphica Playtest 1 is now LIVE!

We had to start 5 hours later than originally intended as we had been updating up to the last minute, and as what usually happens in these cases, introduced more bugs than we were aware of. Our sincere apologies for that, and we're hoping the short delay will be worth the more pleasurable play experience.

[h3]What's New?[/h3]
The playtest brings exciting changes from the demo build, all of which we would love to hear your take on them.

[h3]New Trials Mode[/h3]
Previously we only had an Endless Mode, but now we're introducing the main way we imagine you playing the game, our trials mode. Each trial consists of 5 omens, with each omen consisting of 3 missions of increasing difficulty, which can only be cleared after defeating the new bosses (more on those later). Each omen will also be more difficult and introduce a layer of randomness to the game. After clearing all the omens, you will have cleared the trial, and unlocked the endless mode.

[h3]Bosses[/h3]
We have 2 bosses ready for this playtest, and if all goes well, another one on the way by the next playtest. The Poet forces you to type its poetry before you can clear the stage (poor guy, he just wants someone to listen) and the Cypher is a boss who is both guarded by glyphs you need to decipher to attack him, as well as having an aura that encyphers any words near him.

These are still quite unbalanced so we need to know how you get on with them!

[h3]Live Playtest[/h3]

Just a reminder that this is a live playtest, and anyone interested in participating can request access and should be granted access immediately.

Happy typing, everyone!

Hello Survival Typists!

Thanks so much for your patience. Finally the time has come for us to announce our playtest plans! The last major updates to the demo were made in July in time for our participation in the Steam Next Fest. Since then the demo has not been updated as our focus has been on our Early Access release (which again we must ask some patience for before we announce the date and price!)

In a little over a week, you’ll be able to get your hands on what we’ve been working on in that time.

[h3]Sneak Preview[/h3]

After observing players engage with the game, we wanted address a few things some players were running into. It’s quite hard for a lot of players to type for extended period of time, and the pacing of the endless mode can be a little bit fiddly towards the end. To address that we’re making a more run-based system where a player will have to finish 5 trials and beat bosses to progress through each trial. It's a seemingly small but cruical change, and makes the gameplay experience so much better.

That’s right, we’re creating bosses that are designed around the typing mechanic to spice up the gameplay. As a sneak peek, check out “The Poet” above, a boss that forces you to type out the bad poetry it dictates before you can move on. That’s just a tease of what you can expect in the playtest.

[h3]Demo Plans[/h3]
The demo no longer represents the game as it is now, so once the playtest is live it will be taken down. But we are committed to making sure you know what you are getting into when you play the game. The playtest will be the last chance you will get to try the game and see if it is for you before we launch Early Access.

We will likely release a new demo in the future, but that will take some time and the focus will be on Early Access development.

[h3]Building Hype[/h3]
We want this playtest to be one last big hype push before release. We are working hard behind the scenes, so if you want to support the game please tell all your friends to join the playtest!

[h3]Playtest FAQ[/h3]
We will have 2 separate playtests.

Playtest 1
Friday, September 13, 16:00 (CEST) 22:00 (GMT+8)
Duration : 3 days

Playtest 2
Friday, September 20, 16:00 AM (CEST)
Duration : 3 days

[h3]When can I sign up?[/h3]

Sign ups are open now on the game store page, it should look like the image above (don't click this image, it will do nothing). Sign up and wishlist the game and you should be alerted when the playtest goes live! If you want to be extra sure that you are notified of the Playtest launch, you can also join our mailing list or discord server.

Does my progress in the playtest transfer to the main game?
We are 90% sure that your save will be transferred when you buy the main game. But there is a 10% chance that some changes might make it so that the save file is no longer valid.

When is the Early Access launch?
We will have an announcement about Early Access once the Playtest ends. Until then, enjoy the Playtest!

Hello Survival Typists,

We know it’s been a while since our last update, but we wanted to make sure you know we are hard at work and some of the stuff we’re working on right now.

We will have a much deeper dive into the mechanics of the game in a future post, but for now we wanna talk about languages! That’s right, we’re adding more languages to Glyphica so that more survival typists can enjoy the game!

[h3]Japanese[/h3]

First off, a huge shout out to our Japanese fans. We’re really blown away by how well you have responded to the game, and shown us the possibilities of Glyphica in other languages. We added Japanese localization as kind of an experiment, and then when it took off we were in that weird position of “oh wow, they really like it! Oh no. Now we actually have to do a good job at it.”

With the success of Japanese in mind, we started thinking about other languages to localize to. You’d think Simplified Chinese would be the first target both because of reach and because XM actually speaks and reads Chinese, but there was a little problem…

[h3]Language Limitations[/h3]
The game was designed with the English language and Roman alphabet in mind, and some key mechanics were defined by this. For example, our typical wordlist is 1300 words, but it’s not as simple as downloading a random wordlist from the internet because we use word length as a balancing tool. So for our wordlists we have 5 sets of words from 4 characters up to 8 characters in length.

Some of our weapons are also triggered by words starting out with a specific letter. Again this is for balancing purposes. So for each set of say, 4 letter words, we need at least 10 words for each letter.

That seems reasonable when you have a phonetic alphabet of 26 letters, but how does that work when you have Chinese characters that, even in the simplified form, use around 8000 characters?

Japanese writing is equally or even more complicated, with its three sets of characters ranging from kanji descended from Chinese characters up to hiragana and katakana which are alphabets used for japanese words and foreign loan words. Our saving grace with Japanese is that because of their complicated writing system, japanese keyboard use has adapted such that entering romaji (roman alphabet letters) which are then converted to japanese syllabary is a common enough thing that we could piggy back on it. This led to our current form of the Japanese version of the game which uses romaji input.

It’s not perfect, as on top of having three systems of writing, there are different methods of writing Japanese in romaji, and most Japanese games that focus on typing adapt to how the player types. This was far too difficult for us to implement in the game so we have had to resort to choosing what the most popular method is, based on consultation with our Japanese players.

While China has pinyin script and Korea has its own alphabet, culturally neither of them uses the Latin Alphabet in a similar way as Japanese. We have experimented with Korean and when we brought the game to BICFest it seemed to be ok, so we’ll investigate that further.

We’re also somewhat limited by our font, which doesn’t have cyrillic, thai, or vietnamese versions of its characters, so languages that use those letters are off our list for the immediate future.

[h3]Our Target Languages[/h3]
That leaves us with a limited set of languages to choose from, which use the Roman alphabet. In the end, we’ve decided on supporting the following languages for our Early Access launch:

• English
  
• Spanish
  
• LatAm Spanish
  
• Portuguese
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  
• Italian
  
• German
  
• French
  
• Turkish
  
• Japanese
  
• Polish
  
• Indonesian
  

These represent both the easiest languages we could find, those with what we feel are a significant enough market to do localization, and in the case of Indonesian, we're making a bet into a Southeast Asian language that is supported by Steam.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In line with some other marketing efforts, I've been making some ASMR/Gameplay videos for Glyphica. And since I am learning spanish and have a Spanish keyboard lying around, I thought I would make another video showing off the Spanish localization right now, made by our localizer Valentín Sánchez.

Our demo now has Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Turkish in the demo so if you speak those languages please let us know how it is!

Hello Survival Typists!

We are excited to share that we are part of Tiny Teams 2024, the premiere event celebrating games made by solo developers and micro-studios. We're so excited that we will get a chance to share the game with even more people.

Important note! The build that you will see any influencers playing during the event is a work in progress version of the Early Access build.

The playable demo is an earlier version of the game that is meant to give you a taste of the basic gameplay, while the build that we are working on for Early Access will have much more depth and new mechanics.

We hope you enjoy your time with the demo. Wishlist and follow us to stay aware of the latest news, including our upcoming playtest!

Hello survival typists,

We're coming to you with our final update to the Glyphica demo today. Once again we want to thank you all for playing the game, joining our Discord, and giving us feedback. You've helped us make the game so much better, and most of those changes have foud their way into the demo.

However as we raised in the previous announcement, the demo will stop being updated as some point as we focus our attention on the Early Access build of the game. We have reached that point now. This will be the last update of the demo, with the exception of any patches to fix game breaking bugs.

[h3]Progress will not be Transferrable[/h3]
Please be aware that your progress in the demo will not be transferrable to the Early Access version of the game. The Early Access version of the game adds mechanics and changes systems in a way that will make progress non transferrable. We know that this may be frustrating to some of you, but we hope that you understand and appreciate the demo regardless and look forward to our additions in the Early Access build.

[h3]Language Experimentation[/h3]
Glyphica has been designed in a way that weapon choices are meaningful, many of them being triggered by the first letter of a word. While this makes the game much more strategic than your average typing game, it does mean we can’t simply throw in a wordlist in your language and expect it to work.

For Early Access our current focus is to release with Japanese language included, since we have so many fans from Japan already. But for other languages we will be testing them first before adding official localization during the Early Access process. In the future we also plan to add mod support so that you can share your own wordlists with other players.

But in the meantime we don’t want to leave you hanging. We already have some built in tools that we are using to test out different languages. If you want to play with them in the demo, we have prepared a guide for you to do that:

Glyphica Localization Process
While you cannot share your wordlists as a mod just yet, you should be able to share .jsonc files with other players using your same language.

[h3]Events Schedule[/h3]

Our lead dev XM will be taking Glyphica on the road very soon, bringing with him the latest version of the game:
Bitsummit in Kyoto BICFest in Busan
If you happen to be around, drop by to say hello and give the latest version of the game a spin.

That's all for now, typists, we'll be back with more news soon!

[h3]Changelog[/h3]
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug where Giant Magnet accelerated Meteor pickup cooldowns.
- Fixed "getHit" crash for projectile-based weapons (Repeater, Sentry & Oscillator)
- Fixed game screen getting cut-off for screens smaller than 1080p.
- Fixed bug when canceling the quit confirm prompt freezes the UI.

Balancing
- Improved Japanese wordlist.
- Complete Japanese localization.
- Moved health bar to a more noticeable location.
- Changed "Return to Main Menu" in pause menu to "Surrender" so you can see your summary.
- Play level up confetti effect even when level up prompt is visible.
- Added pending level up count to level up prompt.

Features
- Added localization tool in console.