What if somebody combined one of those typing tutor programs you used back in school with Guitar Hero? Luckily developers Open Steno Project and For All To Play are here to answer that very, very specific question. They’re also here to remind us that Crowd Supply still exists as well.
Steno Arcade is a game about teaching you how to type, specifically on a stenography machine. It’s composed of four arcade games, one of which is Steno Hero, which is already available on Steam. It’s free to play, meaning free to download and play, not the modern sense of it being full of microtransactions. It’s also open source, meaning if you’ve got the know-how you’re free to edit the game to your heart’s content.
Steno Hero is the first of the four games on offer, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a musical game where you have to type out the lyrics as they come up in the song. Now obviously, this being a crowdfunded indie game, there aren’t any big name songs or artists here. If you show up expecting Baby Metal and Chrvches then you’re going to be disappointed.
Instead, you’re getting four musicians: Johnathan Coulton, Dan O’Connor, Josh Woodward, and Hungry Lucy. All that’s available currently though is Johnathan Coulton. I had a quick go of it, and without turning this article into a review, I found it to be much more difficult than I expected. It’s definitely something intended for someone who’s already good at typing and wants to improve, and can handle the stress.
The other games will be aimed more at beginners and intermediate typists and stenographers. What are those other games? Your guess is as good as mine, because only Steno Hero is even mentioned. There’s currently no word on whether or not the developers are planning on revealing the others as the campaign goes on, or if those games even exist yet because so much emphasis is placed on Steno Hero.
It’s a lot to ask of potential backers to only show ¼ of a game, especially at these backer tiers. The tiers jump from $5 straight to $35, then again from $55 all the way to $250, especially since that $250 tier only gets your likeness in the game. Even that’s not very enticing because of the heavily minimalized 8-bit graphics.
What is more enticing though is that there’ll be a screen reader option for the blind. However the developers recommend you have a stenography machine to play the game – as it is a stenography tutor before a typing one. You can play with a keyboard, but it seems only QWERTY keyboards are compatible.
It’s hard to judge the quality of Steno Arcade because there isn’t enough on offer. Again, only ¼ of the game is currently being shown and the other ¾ isn’t even mentioned. Judging by the wording in the pitch video, it sounds like each game is being developed one at a time with Steno Hero being the first (odd considering it’s also the hardest of the four), and that the other three just don’t exist yet. That’s all well and good, that’s what the crowdfunding is for, but backers need to be informed what to expect from those other games. We need to hear concepts, tell us your plans, share some concept art, give us a release schedule, anything other than completely ignoring those other games is fine. Yet that’s exactly what happened.
Maybe what you get from Steno Hero will be enough. It’s certainly seems to be of a high quality, but that’s not much of an indication of how good the other three will be. It’s certainly not having any trouble finding an audience. Steno Arcade has already raised $3,470 of its $7,500 goal and there’s still over a month to go.
If Open Steno Project or For All To Play show any of the remaining games, of if any new songs are added to Steno Hero we’ll be sure to let you know. Until then I’m going to go listen to Babymetal unironically.
People listen to Babymetal ironically? I thought it was just because they’re awesome, because they are.
Heya! Stenoknight here, founder of The Open Steno Project!
To answer some of your questions:
* Yep, Steno Hero is the only game that we’ve developed so far. We paid For All To Play the $4,000 we’ve been collecting from donations and merch sales to develop the playable demo, and the rest of the funding to finish Steno Hero and to develop the other games will come from this crowdfunding campaign. The first stretch goal will allow users to use any song in their library with Steno Hero, and the other three stretch goals will pay for development of the other three games:
Stretch Goals:
$10,500 (Steno Hero – In-Game Song Editor)
We can afford to add an in-game song editor that will make it easy to import your own music into the game. That way you can practice building your typing skills with any song in your music library!
$17,000 (Stenogger)
We can afford to develop Stenogger (Steno Arcade Volume I: Beginner). Hop your way around the steno keyboard and learn what steno is all about!
$23,000 (Stenobolt)
We can afford to develop Stenobolt (Steno Arcade Volume II: Intermediate). Leap over obstacles in a single bound while learning to write the 6,000 most common English words in a single stroke!
$30,000 (Stenografius)
We can afford to develop Stenografius (Steno Arcade Volume III: Advanced). Crunch multisyllabic foes into briefs and build your dictionary while learning how to write any word, name, symbol, emoji, or multiword phrase in the galaxy!
(It’s on our crowdfunding campaign page, but near the bottom)
* Steno Hero doesn’t just work with qwerty keyboards! It’ll work with any layout. We just use “qwerty” as a shorthand for any one-key-per-letter input system, to contrast it with steno input. So Dvorak, Colemak, Norman, or other layout fans can play it just as easily!
* We’re definitely looking to add some easier songs during the campaign. The number one criticism we’re encountering is that even songs that are dead easy for stenographers are really really hard for regular keyboard users, so we’re gonna do our best to accommodate that as soon as we can.
* We developed Steno Hero, the Master level of the Steno Arcade suite, before we developed the other levels, because it’s the most fun to play and also the least steno-specific, so regular keyboard users can play it as well. The other three games (Stenogger, Stenobolt, and Stenografius) are more steno-specific, and will walk people through knowing nothing about steno through to intermediate proficiency, at which point they’ll be ready to play the slower songs in Steno Hero on their steno machine instead of their regular keyboard. Oh, but I should mention that you can use a regular keyboard as a steno machine, typing chords instead of individual keys, as long as it has n-key rollover. The cheapest NKRO keyboard on the market is only $40, so it’s not much of an investment! We have a free online textbook that most of our community has used to teach themselves steno, but we’re hoping that if we get enough money to develop the other games, the textbook will become more of a secondary resource and Steno Arcade will become the primary steno teaching method for hobbyists and amateurs everywhere!
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