Galaxy typing game

The assignment: to create a website that reacts to keyboard inputs

My approach: I wanted to make something that displays differently depending not only on what keys you press, but the orders you press them.

The result: this typing game lets you create ‘solar systems’ out of words, where combinations of vowels and letters make unique ‘orbits’ of satellites around a star. Every new word is added to an overall ‘galaxy’ representing the sentence.

The first letter determines the color of the star. Then, every grouping of X consonants + Y vowels adds a new orbit. Depending on their combination, the ‘planets’ will differ in shape, distance, appearance, satellites, orbit speed, orbit direction, revolution direction, etc.

The word/system builder can be dragged around and collapsed to look at the galaxy. In the galaxy view, the scale, number of offshoots, and position of a word depend on the vowel-count, orbit-count, and the first and last letters.

You can navigate to different words in the sentence by clicking on them OR their corresponding stars in the galaxy.

If you don’t press spacebar, you can go nuts making a gibberish super-galaxy.