Excel Hero — where Accountants Rock Out
A client has just launched a game I developed, Excel Hero. This game tests your skill at Microsoft Excel keyboard shortcuts. Exciting, right? Well, if you’re a hardcore Excel user, this game is actually pretty fun. There’s a countdown timer and high score as well as a random selection of shortcuts to test your skill that get increasingly difficult. I executed all the flash development in partnership with a guy who came up with the idea and Matt Coffee, who designed/illustrated the sweet landing page.
The simplicity of the game (and the strange requirement to click in a field below the game) mask a ridiculous challenge that the game presented: capturing literally every keystroke. Of particular “joy” was the Alt (Option) key which Flash Plugin has no access to. Another fun thing that required significant hackery was the fact that your web browser thinks it should be in charge of common shortcuts like Print (Ctrl-P) and the like.
What made this all possible was leaving Javascript 100% in charge of blocking and capturing literally all keystrokes and then handing their keycodes off to Flash to interpret as they related to the current challenge. In the end, a triple-tag-team of Flash, Javascript and PHP ultimately provide a fairly seamless experience on both Firefox and IE. Rumor has it Chrome doesn’t play well. So it goes. Good times.
