The Psychology of a WTL Project: Lowercase Cause (a typing program)

Lowercase Cause
Version 1.0
By Mark Petrik Sosa
mark.petrik.sosa@gmail.com
	
Intro:

Lowercase Cause is here to serve the world of the agile programming typing athlete. It is built to support you, the programmer in his quest for typing mastery. Most can handle alpha characters, yet quickly become bogged down with special characters used in characters. Lowercase Cause uses the concept of phrase lists to define what is to be practiced. A phrase file is a simple new line delimited list of strings. Each string will be a possible phrase you will be presented to type out. The program will search its current directory for files with an ".ini" extension. These are will be loaded into the list on startup. A phrase file may use the "\n" sequence to denote a new line. When a list is chosen it will load all strings in memory and present them to you randomly.
 
Game play:
	
	Two modes are supported, survival and timed.

Survival starts you off with a limited amount of lives and your intention is to score as many points as possible by typing correct phrases and closing windows. A window is closed when you type the phrase in complete without any inconsistencies with the original phrase and hit enter. Each window is given a "lifetime" or a set amount of time before it disappears and "dies". When a window dies you lose a life. Survival is based on difficulty and the lifetimes will vary according to the difficulty. The basic theory is that if you type at the difficulties' WPM and close the windows in the order they appear you will never die. In practice it is almost impossible to keep track of the order.
	There is a feature which attempts to solve this by fading the windows from white to purple. The brighter the purple, the closer it is to death. This allows a player to quickly glance and choose the windows which are closest to death and thus closest to taking a life away from you.

	Timed mode starts you off at the lowest difficulty and gives you a large amount of lives. You have to try pretty hard to die in timed mode from losing all your lives but it is possible. You game will end once the elapsed time is equal to the time you set for the timed game.

High Scores:

	High Scores are based on points and nothing else. Only one high score will be recorded for each game type. Which is 8 types for survival (8 difficulty levels) and around 4,294,967,295 types (amount of combinations for minutes before it overloads) for timed. You will be presented with a screen to type in your name if you receive a high score. 

Tips:

	When typing out a phrase and not finishing in time (the window reaches it�s lifetime on you) you must clear all the text and start with a new one. I could have made this user friendly, but we are all programmers here. You must hold down delete, use the mouse to select all the text or hit a quick ctrl + a then delete.