KEYS OF FURY
Keys of Fury is a 2D action typing game by studio Elecorn, where instead of pressing action buttons or the directional pad for combos, players type thematic words on their keyboard to assist the main character in their Kung Fu. Keys of Fury features a story mode, an arcade mode, and is modding-friendly—allowing players to mod in their own story. My first impression of the game actually came from the booth itself. I noticed a table and wall covered in different types of keyboards, and I had to know what the game was about.
The gameplay of Keys of Fury brings a modern refresh to the typing game genre. While we’ve seen a few larger titles and smaller, more educational games in this space, Keys of Fury feels like a fully developed game where typing is seamlessly woven into the story. As players progress through the narrative, they must type prompted words to fight off robots, ninjas—even vegetables. The words are thematically tied to each level, so it never feels random. Instead, it pulls you deeper into the world you’re typing in. Even in story mode, you have to type out responses to NPCs, which adds a fun layer of interactivity. The game uses fluid 2D pixel art, with a strong emphasis on character movement that really brings the action to life.
One thing that really stood out during my interview with Mike of Elecorn was how, even as a solo developer, he never felt alone in the creative process. He told me that whenever he had a question or idea he wanted to implement, he would turn to his family and friends for feedback and advice. He was genuinely open to any input, believing it would help bring his vision to life in a more meaningful way.
I would absolutely recommend Keys of Fury to anyone looking to test their typing skills against a variety of creative enemy types. Whether you're battling bots or duking it out with digital veggies, it’s a clever and engaging experience. There’s no public demo available at the moment, but definitely keep an eye out towards the end of 2025 if you’re looking for a fun and unique way to sharpen your keyboard skills.
Taz: This is Taz here with Mike Smith from Keys of Fury, here at Geek Fest 2025, day two. Mike, how has your weekend been going so far?
Mike: Pretty good. So far, we've had a lot of people come in, play the game, give me some good feedback, find a few issues, and things to improve. So it's been great.
Taz: Great. Has this been Keys of Fury’s first convention, or have you brought that to a couple other places?
Mike: This is the first time that it's been out in the open, publicly, yeah.
Taz: And then tell me a little bit about it. You had let me play a little bit of the demo. Looks great. Plays great. Action is phenomenal. What got you inspired to make something like that?
Mike: Yeah, so my son was playing a game called Typer Shark, and I thought it was a pretty awful game, but he seemed to be enjoying it well enough. And I decided that there was an opportunity to make a typing game that I actually thought was fun. I played Typing of the Dead, which I thought was really fun, but it was also a little stressful and a little bit gory and violent a bit so I thought, “Well, okay, I want to do more of a fighter type of typing game” things that I like, like Kung Fu, and so that's where the Keys of Fury comes in, kifu and sort of all sorts of puns related to that. The main character's name is Tai Ping, so her name's Ping, family name Tai, so “typing“ is her name.
Taz: That's amazing. You gave me a little bit of the history. The origin. Was this your first game like, what got you into game development?
Mike: No, been doing games my entire career. Started when I graduated University. My first job was in games. Before that, at university, I did animation software, and so, yeah, I worked for Head Gate studios, and then they got bought by EA. And then I went to Hidden Path Entertainment, worked on Counter Strike, and then did some contracting. And now I'm at Amazon Games, just finished up some work on New World. Now we're working on the next project. As far as my first personal game. The first one I shipped on my own was Caster, that was shipped in 2009 and then we ported it to a bunch of different platforms. After that, did a game with my family called Rainbow Ball into Adventure for Xbox indie games. And then Keys of Fury was the one after that. And that's what I've been working on for the last eight plus years, actually. So it's been a while, but you know.
Taz: Wow, I did overhear you as I was playing, you're doing a little bit of everything. Are you a one-man show or, like, how many people have you been working on this project with?
Mike: Yeah, I do everything. I do contract out some of the background art, because I just there was so much work to do, and I didn't have enough time, and I wanted to get the game done. So I would do mock-ups, and then have some people finish up the background art. Some of the music I had a friend do a couple songs, and my son's a composer, so I had him do a few of the songs. But I also took the opportunity to do my own music. So I also did. Prior games I had someone else do the music, but this one, I decided, “You know what, I'll just write some music as well.” So.
Taz: Yeah, and I'm here at your booth. You got a lot of keyboards going, going, a few stations for people to play. Even have a high scoreboard. Tell me a little bit about that.
Mike: Yeah. Last year, I was helping a friend out at PAX with The War of the Western Deep, where we had a booth, and I'm helping out on that project as well. And I thought, well, if I did a booth for Keys of Fury, what would I want it to be? I had in my mind this idea of just a booth completely covered with keyboards everywhere. And I got really excited about the idea, and so kind of made it a reality. It's basically really close to what I had envisioned. And that was kind of fun, actually, to take an idea of this booth with just keyboards everywhere and just make it happen.
Taz: Yeah, I love it. And you were showing me you got, like, key chain key caps. Tell me a little bit about those.
Mike: Yeah. So that was sort of a recent idea. I was at a Fourth of July fair, and I saw a gal who had a booth there, and she had the most amazing 3D printed stuff, and some of them were these little clicky things, like a cat's paw that you would click, and it had a little key mechanism in there. I'm like, “Oh, that's perfect for me, because I'm making a keyboard game.” So my key clicker thing should actually be keys for a keyboard. And so I talked to my friend Dan, who had done a booth at Duval Days, where I live, and so I knew he did 3D printing stuff. And so we chatted, and he got really excited about the idea of making these little key clicker things. And we just decided it would be fun, and we did it, and we're having a blast.
Taz: I love it. You got you really capitalized on the theme of your game, and you you have everything to show for it, you would have what that going to a raffle?
Mike: That's right, we also have a raffle. So I reached out to the Seattle mechanical keyboards interest group, and a guy there Jordan that heads it up. He was super generous, and we talked, we chatted, and I told him about my idea with a booth full of keyboards, and if there's some way we could cross-promote his group and everything. And so he had a bunch of keyboards that were donated to him. They were given away free by companies that wanted their keyboards produced, promoted. And so yeah, he gave me a whole bunch of new keyboards that I can show off and give away for a raffle. We don't sell any of them. They're just for giving away. And yep. So we decided to do that. So I thought it would be fun. If you play the game, you can put a ticket in, and then we just have a raffle at six o'clock, not necessary, but something fun and something for people to, you know, a little touch of extra nicety for the event, I guess.
Taz: Yeah. And then tell me a little about the game itself. So we talked a lot about gameplay, you know, it's all about typing. We mentioned a few other games in the past, but yours has, like, a full written story. Tell me a little about the inspiration behind that.
Mike: Yeah, so there was a lot of time and thought put into the world that I wanted to put it in and vibe that I wanted to give it. I create all this detailed world stuff in my head, and then I use that as a background to drive the game. But I don't explain and go into too much detail about things until it comes up, but basically, the storyline takes place in the late 1800s there are robots around, and there's an energy source that drives them, sort of steam-like, and you have to get to Central for reasons that aren't yet explained. But on your way there, there's, of course, can't quite get there because it's locked down for some reason, which you don't know why, and the mayor offers to help you out, but you have to do some favors for him in turn, and that's kind of all we have for that. I don't want to reveal too much, but it's pretty deep. I don't know that the game will ever explore the entirety of it, but that's okay, it's mostly to be there, to have something to build on, and know where to go if something comes up.
Taz: For sure. And you were telling me a little bit about different game modes. What game modes do we have available?
Mike: So we have the main story mode, which I want to incorporate all the different kinds of gameplay into that. But then we have other modes. A friend of mine helped me with some design work, and he had the idea of doing a sort of rogue-like, so you could level up as you go through the game. And so I added that mechanic, and I have a mode that will… it's always been a trick to balance difficulty with completion. And so I have this road mode, but you can finish it, but then it unlocks another roguelike mode, which is harder and so on, so that it's trying to get challenged in there, as well as a feeling of accomplishment that you did finish part of it. And in that mode, you'll fight a few waves, and then you'll get different power-ups, such as more time before the word timer starts, more time on projectiles thrown at you. There's the fury in the game. In the Keys of Fury, probably the key mechanic, is this fury meter that you build up over time, and you can get power ups to increase the speed at which it builds up and then when it executes by pressing the semicolon, or if you get hit, once it's fully charged, you will automatically destroy a certain number of enemies in front of you. It starts off with just one enemy, but as you level that up, you can knock out up to eventually, 10 enemies back to back, just watch it play out, sit back, watch it play out, and just feel good about the fact that you're destroying all your enemies.
Taz: No, when that mechanic showed up, I was because I did get hit, but since it activated, it was just very satisfying to kind of just like watch the player kind of do it, do their thing, do some kung fu action, while without me having to worry about it. Very satisfying mechanic I do enjoy, kind of builds up to a power to your keys of fury. Love the and I also noticed, as I was typing the words, I realized I didn't, I'm not typing like random words. You were kind of what I noticed, more of a theme for the words used in this, in the typing.
Mike: Yeah, that's right. So when you fight the vegetable boss, for example, he uses all sorts of words related to vegetables and cooking, and when he throws vegetables at you, the name, you have to type the name of each of those actual vegetables that are thrown, and they're all different. So there's lots of vegetables in the game. When you fight the ninjas, there's words based around stealth and ninjas and weapons and that kind of thing. It just seemed more appropriate and fun. I also have a dad jokes section where you just type dad jokes. I don't know I like dad jokes, so I decided to put it in. And then a dinosaur running section where you race against dinosaurs. And at first, I had you actually type names of dinosaurs, which was incredibly difficult. Those words are very hard. But then I decided, okay, well, just do dinosaur adjacent words, and that's like level one, and after you beat that, then you do the actual names of dinosaurs.
Taz: Oh, okay, cool. Wow. So you have a lot of different themes. This world is, you know, very thematic: vegetables, ninjas, dinosaurs, very cool. Love it. You've said you've been working on this game for you said about eight years. If you could go back in time, maybe to the start, maybe to the middle, and change something, either small, big, what would it be and why?
Mike: Well, I mean, it's eight years, right? So I'm in the position where I don't have to do anything, and I can just decide how I want it to be. So anything that I would have wanted to change, I could just change, because since I'm not on a tight deadline, so it has had a lot of changes. The game is fundamentally different than it was originally. I tried a lot of things that didn't work, and they just weren't as satisfying, or they added some frustration or stress, and I didn't want that in my game. So even though it was a cool idea, I thought it was cool. I would just cut it. Because I'm like, No, this is not I couldn't figure out how to make it a pleasant experience, so I would just cut it and go with something else.
Taz: Wow. Okay, so that's gonna kind of like, the beauty of being kind of independent. You're on your own timeline. If you want to change anything, you can; you're not stressed out about time. You can really put in the love and care into this game that's needed for something like this, especially if you're gonna bring it to conventions. Have you, you know, put it out there? What is the release window look like if it's not already released?
Mike: So I have, I can give keys out to people to play it on Steam right now, it's not yet for sale. I plan to get it on sale end of this year. I just have to do a couple more bosses, and then I think we're good. And then update it as makes sense, adding new content and whatnot. It's pretty easily moddable. You can add your own Word files. You can add your own levels. In fact, you can make your own games completely from scratch. I made everything text-based. So as I was developing it, I was developing it with the idea that for mod-ability. So from the get-go. There's also things in there, like you can buy outfits and accessories just for fun. And then I also have one of my favorite things, which not a lot of people know about, is an Orchestrion, which is a music playing machine from back in the late 1800s and as you play the songs that are in the game, you'll see the different instruments in the orchestrion play along with the song in the game. So that's probably one of my favorite features that I added that had, you know, didn't justify itself, but I just wanted it in there, so I added it.
Taz: Yeah, oh, so you put a little piece of yourself in that.
Mike: Oh yeah, there’s tons and tons of stuff that is only in there because I really like it and it doesn't need to be there.
Taz: That's, that's, that's beautiful, that's just really nice to hear. That's all the questions I have. So this is the time for you, Mike. Tell us where we can find you, where we can find the game. How do we, how do we keep an eye on that?
Mike: Yeah, probably the best thing is to just wishlist it on Steam. You can also do keysoffury.com, but sometimes that redirect doesn't work. I don't know, so elecorn.com/keysoffury also works. Yeah, wishlisting on Steam’s probably the best way to do it. I'm also on Blue Sky and X and Instagram, but I think wish listing is probably just the best thing to see what's happening and when it gets released.
Taz: Awesome. Well, Mike, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I might have to come back to try to get on that high score board, but have a great rest of your Geek Fest.
Mike: Well, thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
