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Show HN: A Multiplayer Geography Game Using WebSockets
- xbryanx 10y agoAddictive and fun. The timing on the turns is just right. If you're looking for feedback, I'd suggest putting the leaderboard up and to the right on bigger screens. I had to keep scrolling down in between turns to see how I was doing. Also, several times it didn't register my clicks and I have to try a few times before it worked.
- chatmasta 10y agoI wish it worked on mobile! I'll check it out on my desktop though. Edit: just played it. Awesome. A few suggestions: - show me my total score! Unless I'm on the leaderboard, I don't know what it is - it's unclear whether the "you are #x of Y players" is referring to my standing on just that turn, or the last 20, or what - more cities, as others have said. Or at least shuffle it better so it's not as obvious when I've gone back to the beginning Also, a recommendation on making the mechanics work on mobile: make it a race to zoom into the city the fastest. So you have to "pull" the map as fast as you can until the correct location is on the center of the screen. You can zoom as high resolution as you want for more points. This would eliminate the problem of imprecise tapping on mobile, and make it a fun finger motion to practice.
- SamBam 10y agoIt took me a while to realize, but "you are #x of Y players" refers to the closest people to that specific city. I was pretty pleased to get a few #1s. It countered my several "too far!"s.
- aerique 10y agoYou're going to make mad money. (Or someone else who steals your idea and makes it work on mobile.) Awesome game and idea!
- y04nn 10y agoThere is already apps working on the same principle. iirc I played a game like this 1 or 2 years ago, but it was a turn based game. Very fun to play. Also, this game is very nice to learn web socket, the code and flow is easy to understand.
- thecolorblue 10y agoReally fun. Showing a leaderboard is a good idea. Also, sometimes I wanted to adjust my guess with another click. Something to think about.
- iends 10y agoThere is a bug somewhere where it doesn't register for clicks after a few rounds. Chrome 52, OS X.
- kyberias 10y agoSame on Windows. Some clicks get unregistered. I had to click multiple times.
- marcusarmstrong 10y agoSuper fun. I'd add more locations, though... I quit playing once I got through the whole list. Also, there were a handful of times when the timer would "jump" right at the end (before I'd gotten my pin placed) EDIT: Also, just remembered... This also exists: https://www.tripadvisor.com/TIQGame https://www.tripadvisor.com/TIQGame
- quantumtremor 10y agoThis is really great. A few thoughts -Did you have any trouble with the sockets library? -I saw you explicitly mentioned "plane_distance", so are you planning on adding Haversine distance or something else? -Maybe make the map take up the entire screen? Status and first few on the leaderboard could go in the ocean.
- abrena 10y agoThe socket library (Flask SocketIO) works great and has a good documentation. I used plane distance because it's faster to compute and the accuracy is good enough for this use case. Regarding the UX I think it's a good idea to make the map take the entire screen. Thanks for the feedback
- benas 10y agoI'm addicted already!! Thank you for making this
- Deregibus 10y agoWe used to play a game like this at my last company using a 4'x6' foamboard map that someone had pulled out of the trash. We would stand far enough back that you couldn't read the text on the map, use a generator to select a random country, then throw darts. Closest dart wins the point. It worked surprisingly well since even if you really knew your geography you still had the challenge of actually getting the dart there.
- wyldfire 10y agoI can't stop playing!
- BenoitP 10y agoVery fun, but a bit stressful. Making games take a determined number of turns would allow players to rest. Also, displaying the score right along the windows would be nice. Other than that, great work!
- Laurentvw 10y agoReally fun game! Reminds me of https://geoguessr.com https://geoguessr.com which drops you in a random location (in Street View mode) and your task is to pinpoint the location on a map.
- LargeCompanies 10y agoGreat game and to make it even better find a graphic designer/designer friend to make this pop even more!
- sailfast 10y agoThis is a lot of fun but I'd also recommend allowing zoom for greater precision then resetting after each question. Pretty simple JS commands for Leaflet to handle and would make a HUGE difference - not sure how folks are getting so precise on such a small map :)
- Cyph0n 10y agoSomeone has probably already written some JS that plays the game automatically. The way I'd do it is 1) track the current turn, 2) look up the city's coordinates using a reverse geocoder like OSM's Nominatim[1], and 3) draw a marker at the location using Leaflet. [1]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
- abrena 10y agoIt would be nice indeed but the fact that you cannot zoom limits the number of requests to the map tiles provider.
- thesmok 10y agoIf I know precisely the location of a city (like Kyiv, Istanbul in my case) I was able to pin it with 20 to 45km precision. I think it's close enough on a world scale.
- kranner 10y agoThe 'averaged' location of all answers for the current question would be quite interesting to see.
- andrewclunn 10y agoSmaller resolution + New Zealand = automatic loss :(
- tmnvix 10y agor/mapswithoutnz Great fun all the same!
- chii 10y agoThe worldmap seems to not include new zealand, because it takes the browser's zoom level (which i have set to high), and scales it badly to clip out the sides.
- wingerlang 10y agoYou can drag it. It should include it by default though, I had the same issue.
- chii 10y agoyou can't drag it, because as soon as you clicked, it chose the location of the answer, and so you get it wrong!
- wingerlang 10y agoI can. Using mouse, OSX, Chrome.
- netcraft 10y agoI really like it - a couple of opinions though - the time could be extended just a bit, maybe its my pre-coffee state but I sometimes needed a couple more seconds just to think about the name. Also consider changing the scoring to be relative - getting on the right continent would be worth something - for some of these you could guess close enough that if you went and looked at a map for that guess you would be close enough to find the city - but it was still technically too far to count. Agree with someone else that your total score should be shown somewhere.
- wnevets 10y agoclicking the on small islands seems to be too hard but other than that a great idea.
- janithl 10y agoPerhaps add a rate of scoring? Total score / no. of attempts. And, if possible, a magnifying glass to the cursor. Thanks for the game, really enjoyed it!
- dudul 10y agoMaybe I missed it, but it would be good to display the player's current score.
- dhritzkiv 10y agoFun. Quite tricky when it comes to remembering where each of the Guineas (Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Papua New Guinea) is. One issue: the cursor seemed to be inaccurate for me most of the time, even when I knew exactly where the location was. For me, the click registered at the top of the crosshairs (instead of the middle). Further, I might change the cursor to be a map pin, and use the pin's point as the accepted answer.
- mlok 10y agoI enjoy playing this game. But the map is cropped and New Zealand does not appear, so it was impossible for me to pin Wellington.
- mlok 10y agoAlso, I'd love to have a few seconds when the solution is given to learn from my mistakes. Right now it's going too fast... (I guess that would be a "training mode")
- rhaps0dy 10y agoNew Zealand does appear. If the map appears cropped, you can move it by dragging with the mouse. Awesome game.
- jpna66dd 10y agoAddictive and fun! Thank you! The fact that the crowd playing did not bring it down load-wise is just as impressive. Back-end deployment story?
- abrena 10y agoI was a bit worried when I saw so many people playing simultaneously because the game is hosted on a 2€ VPS at OVH but it worked great!
- bwigfield 10y agoDid anyone else see this and want to cheat? http://imgur.com/a/l4n85 http://imgur.com/a/l4n85 Method: - grab cites.db from repo and dump cities to file with sqlite - use perl to convert data to json - use dev console to import cities object - one quick js function to get called when websockets gives us a 'new_turn' message that sends a 'answer' message with data from our lookup table I know I cheated, but for me this was super fun. (I never make it to the top of a score board in videos games without some sort of hackery involved).
- 120bits 10y agoI loved it!! Would it even better if we have a certain level of zooming to improve the location accuracy. I missed out on some European cities. I think it was Copenhagen. Nice work!
- yoha 10y agoIt might be useful to allow changing one's guess. It's pretty annoying when you misclick in the middle of the map and cannot pick the correct location.
- Temjin 10y agothis is really fun
- threeio 10y agoI could play this all day. fun.
- telesilla 10y agoYou now belong to the club: http://worldmapswithout.nz http://worldmapswithout.nz
- flanbiscuit 10y agoit's actually there, you can move the image to the left and you'll see it. it's "off screen"
- telesilla 10y agoThe map determines the move gesture as a click, placing your guess for Wellington as being in the Tasman ocean. But then, at least it's not asking for Tonga.
- lucb1e 10y agoUh both America and Asia are out of view by default for me, and NZ has to be scrolled to just like those continents.
- malkia 10y agoVery cool, but how many turns?!?!/
- Gonzih 10y agoSometimes click does not register. Very irretating with this small amount of time givet to click. Also map is way too small on high resolution screens. Other than that very cool idea!
- bencoder 10y agoLooks like someone has found an XSS attack :D
- Deuterio7 10y agoIt was fun until someone inserted alerts with "xss" as text.
- hayksaakian 10y agoSomeone found XSS bug http://i.imgur.com/gni56Rf.png http://i.imgur.com/gni56Rf.png
- alanz1223 10y agocreated a github issue... This is why we cant have nice things lol
- aphextron 10y agoThis is quite fun, although I would say the map needs to be a bit bigger to allow for better precision.
- freshyill 10y agoSo an alert that just says "xss" just started popping up after a few cities. Did somebody discover something mid-game and start injecting that? http://i.imgur.com/SkXWnvV.png http://i.imgur.com/SkXWnvV.png
- eonw 10y agoi played for a bit, it was fun. thank you for sharing.
- edem 10y agoIt doesn't work on mobile. The UI is cluttered to a level of unplayableability.
- rajangdavis 10y agoVery fun game!
- ratnakar007 10y agoLoved the game.
- gabomagno03 10y agoLove it, played for like 30 minutes. There used to be a great Facebook game called GeoChallenge similar to this, for some reason got terminated and I never played another Facebook game after.
- sharkdp 10y agoVery nice game! I've written a similar game a while back (single player, though): http://david-peter.de/quizzity/ http://david-peter.de/quizzity/
- abrena 10y agoGreat UI! Thanks for the feedback
- galfarragem 10y agoAs somebody that consistently does good in these geography games (even competing with other HNrs), I wonder if is there a way to capitalize/use this skill?