The August 2025 update for Typing Simulator is now live!
We're now into the second of these monthly updates. This will be the first of the visual content additions to the game with a new wood keycap shader! Wooden keycaps are a pretty popular alternative material, so we wanted to do our best to take the time to capture the look of these accurately. All of our keycap materials use one main monolithic shader, so the upgrades that we made for the wood material will also improve our preexisting materials. Even without the wood shader you'll see some (potentially very subtle, but still present) improvements in the visuals of your current keebs too.
For those more interested in the technical side of things: the main change to the shader that allowed for the wood material to happen was us spinning up a custom triplanar texture effect with per axis texture tiling. While all of the keycaps are UVed pretty meticulously (we'll have to do a whole separate blog post about this at some point), using a triplanar effect for this allowed us to get where we wanted to be without making those keycap UVs even more complicated.
(This doesn't even include the multiple subgraphs!)
This also gave us the chance to find a sneaky bug in the keyboard initialization script. If you ever saw your keycap textures jump around kind of randomly, or ever had all of the textures look exactly the same accross all of your keycaps, that should be fixed now. This won't be our last pass at shader improvements (as it most certainly isn't going to be the only material we add, we have a few more in the works!), so you should see even more of these sorts of upgrades soon.
(Yeah, these gifs are rough, but they look cool!)
Aside from this, you should see some more UI improvements. We've upgraded the look on the Control Hint UI by redoing the visuals a little bit and adding some more sleek animations. That had been stubbed in real quick along the way and we hadn't made time to go back and refresh that till now, so it had been looking a little rough. While this in of itself isn't a crazy impactful change, it lays the groundwork for all of the UI to hit a new level of polish as we go along.
Thank you yet again for all of the support, let us know if you encounter any bugs, and we'll keep the content coming your way!
Typing Simulator Dev Team
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