I Built a Typing Game Alone. Now I Want People Around It.

Every line of TypeVelocity is mine. Design, code, blog posts, the 2 AM CSS sessions nobody asked for. I don't have a team. I don't have contributors. Just a text editor and an unhealthy relationship with Chrome DevTools.

I like it that way, mostly. You ship fast when nobody has opinions about your button radius.

But I've been thinking about something. I have an X account, a DEV.to blog, and this site. All broadcast channels. I talk at the internet, it occasionally likes a post and moves on. Nobody's telling me the idle drain timer ruined their Hard mode run, or that they just hit 90 WPM and want to tell someone who gets why that matters. A like button doesn't give me that.

So I opened a Discord server.

Why Discord

Typing game community -- sounds niche. Most people type to get work done. They don't sit around discussing it. But the ones who do care about it? They really do. If you've ever re-run a test six times because you were 3 WPM short of a PR, you know what I mean. That energy has nowhere to go right now. Twitter feeds bury things in seconds. Reddit threads go cold. Discord is different -- people stick around in the room. Conversations actually build on each other.

What's in There

A few channels. Score sharing -- screenshot your results, post it. Word suggestions. Bug reports (there are definitely bugs I haven't found). General chat for keyboards, typing, whatever.

No 40-channel server with role hierarchies and seven bots.

The thing I care about most is letting people shape what gets built. My roadmap is one person's roadmap. Maybe the rank thresholds feel off at certain WPM ranges. Maybe there's a mode I haven't thought of. I genuinely won't know until someone tells me, and right now nobody's telling me.

The Leaderboard Question

People keep asking about global leaderboards. Fair enough -- I want one too. Problem is TypeVelocity runs 100% client-side. No server, no database, no accounts. Anyone with a browser console can fake a 300 WPM score in ten seconds flat. I'm not standing up a leaderboard that gets gamed on day one.

So for now the Discord IS the leaderboard. You screenshot your results. People see the full screen -- WPM, accuracy, time, rank badge, streak. Nobody's fabricating a screenshot to flex on 15 people in a small server. Stakes are low enough that nobody cheats but high enough that bragging feels good. That works for me.

It's Empty

Should be upfront: the server has basically no one in it right now. I think that's fine though. The first few people who join a Discord set the entire vibe of the place. I'd take 20 people who actually play and talk over 500 who showed up for a giveaway and muted everything.

If you join and post a score, I'm going to see it and respond. That's what happens when one person runs the server. Direct access to the person building the thing. Won't always be that way.

I'm not trying to compete with Monkeytype or TypeRacer's communities -- those are great, I use them. TypeVelocity is a weirder thing. It has a rhythm game mode, ranks that roast you when you're slow, a profile page that generates trash talk based on your play patterns. I want the community to match the game's personality. Small, a bit odd, and full of people who actually care about it.