Show HN: A mobile-friendly, web-based, countries of the world game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A mobile-friendly, web-based, countries of the world game

geogee.me

112 pointsemurph5558 comments

As someone who is kind of awful at geography I think this is pretty great. Kind of a Duo Lingo for countries of the world.

However, I found the population ones frustrating because there were multiple answers kind of in the same ballpark. For example, I think it makes sense to teach people a country of 20 million vs a country of 100 million but 57,100,000 vs 57,200,000 is a bit of a trick question to me.

Also, when I did get questions wrong I found the app very unhelpful to correct me. As others have stated, those info boxes are much more useful after a wrong answer than a right one. Most of the ones I got wrong was a guessing game to randomly pick something.

Looks like there's a bug there. I got two identical answers to choose from:

https://imgur.com/a/kvHCOrb

This is great. I'm a big fan of anything that makes memorization and learning fun and iterative.

Is it appropriate if I share one of my own creations?

https://ablakey.github.io/state-machine/index.html

The State Machine is a little geography game I made that I think can be addictive due to its simplicity.

Your stupid sort page made me laugh. You should create more stuff for http://todays.pointless.click/

The “back” function seem broken on mobile. Also, it’s not a fun learning experience if you don’t get the correct answer when you get something wrong.

It’s also not “unlucky” to be wrong, don’t patronise your users.

I am agreed on gameplay, not meaning to be critical and certainly not wanting to hurt feelings. But it feels more like some game that comes in a Christmas cracker than something with any long term value. I did manage to complete the original Trivial Pursuit in one turn, 'blue' squares (geography) being the big help. How come that was so compelling? People actually wanted to play it, at the time you would have more players than places at the table, having to double up into teams.

The rewards on this game are not there, there is no compelling secret sauce.

Graphics are certainly not the be-all and end-all. I spent 24 hours (or was it 36) without sleep playing Universal Paperclips to the end when that came out, this is a text only interface:

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

I bought the T-shirt too!

Geography trivia is very much my thing, I knew the capital cities of every country and all the U.S. state capitals when I was aged 10. This knowledge has actually been incredibly useful as when I meet anyone from any part of the world I have something positive to say about where they are from even if I have never been there.

If I had to refactor this game then that is what I would try and instil - 'quality trivia' that can't be instantly Googled. I think the key to it is to have highly unusual trivia, e.g. how it is that so many people have swimming pools in Harare. Sometimes 'facts' might not be 'fact based', e.g. how the finest pastries in the world happen to be in Hungary. In an age when information can be Googled there needs to be more, an understanding with story narrative. All of this requires time to research and write, not good if you want to churn out an app, but essential if you want to deliver a transformative experience as per 'Universal Paperclips'.

You just can't go back, I think it's wanted.

You get the answer, when you get something wrong the question is asked again at the end until you get it write.

That's fine, but I had to click the back button a dozen times to get out of the game, which is annoying.

Long-press the back button.

Yeah, for some reason on my firefox mobile (stable) the history list disappears immediately after releasing the long press, making the selection of a specific history item impossible :S

In any case, why does the site pollute the history with what are effectively noop items?

If the intention is to prevent the user from going back to previous question, it would be better to change the behaviour of the request and make t client side rather than highnacking the back button like most slide show websites do.

Edit: I couldn’t even spam back to get out, it would go back and then pull me forward to next question. I had to just change the URL back to HN.

Neat! Happy it works on mobile web. FYI, there’s a short pause after getting a wrong answer that almost seems like the app is waiting for me to try again. Sadly if I tap during that moment, the ui updates and then I get the next one wrong too. Maybe hide or grey out the answers once you get a question wrong? Or as a sibling comment said, just show the extra info right or wrong. Thanks for sharing!

On the to-do list. Thanks!

Looks pretty and feels good :-)

Reminds me of the 'Ultimate Geography' decks for Anki [1].

Would love to see some kind of a multiplayer version.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2109889812

Breaks the back-button.

Would be kinda nicer if it didn't store so much data in the URLs.

Thought I could get away with breaking the back button because it's a game but I agree it is a bit annoying. Regarding the URLs. The reason for them holding so much info is that I wanted a structure that would allow them to work even when offline

I clicked on one category, didn't like the question and couldn't go back. :(

Nice!

I like the idea and design

Two things that bugged me:

1. I'd like a fast mode, where you just get immediate feedback on the answer (with correct answer displayed) and then onto next question immediately without showing the country info bit

2. who's flag -> whose flag (or "which country's flag is this")

> I'd like a fast mode, where you just get immediate feedback on the answer (with correct answer displayed)

I'm really annoyed by unnescesary delays, this mode with improve it tons for me. Even leaving the info could be fine, but it took ~1s delay for it to appear..

This is cool. One nit: The "read more about" button isn't a button, but a clickable div. So it doesn't look like a clickable element to Vimium, screen readers, etc.

Otherwise, good job.

I thin you should gather people's mistakes for each question and present correct answer together with some of the most mistaken ones.

I got 6/7 capitals right (7th on second try) just by eliminating insane sounding ones and without actually being able to name the capital of any country I was asked about.

Thanks. That is something that will be added soon. The push notifications already work off a similar idea

Just a simple game I made to keep myself occupied on flights and on the metro. Still very much a WIP.

I think the 'some info' page should be shown after every answer, especially on answers that were marked as incorrect. How will I ever learn if it doesn't tell me what the right answer is? Other than that, nice work!

Yeah, I think you are right about that. I'll try work something in at lunch tomorrow. Cheers

It's the punishment for not getting the answer right! I thought the same initially, to show the explanation after every try but the explanation comes as reward once you get it right. You get unlimited chances to guess the wrong ones so might as well force the learning of the question and reward it with the info.

Looking at the URL: https://geogee.me/-ze-a1-ah-za-a2-xa4-zg-aa-zg-a4-zg-ab-zg-a..., it seems that the answer is always the last city name mentioned in the URL, so you could cheat at this pretty easily

Love it. Especially like that it's actually difficult. I used to think I'm good at geography, but after getting just 4/7 on the capital cities quiz, maybe I'm not so hot after all.

I too was annoyed by the broke back button. But that's a great game. I enjoyed the chance to get it right by the end of the quiz and the educational content after each question.

Just as a heads up since I don't see it mentioned in the comments yet, I got a description of Palestine for Peru, apart from the hiccup it's definitely a lot of fun

I also got a description of some British protectorate for Åland, but it's otherwise really cool

Not sure if the "Maps of X" games are titled appropriately. They should be called "Shapes of X". Even after learning shapes of various countries, I don't learn where they are on a map, though I can recognize them by searching a map and eventually identifying them by their shape. Maybe in the info section after you guess it right, you can show a map and show the country you just identified highlighted on the map.

There's a map theme in the settings that gives you approximate location in the background. The actual location is hidden away behind the questions (at least on desktop).

Another good "countries of the world game" which is more based on maps is: http://click-that-hood.com/

Especially the Africa variant: http://www.youdontknowafrica.com/

When asked what country boarders France only Switzerland is marked as correct, picking Spain is marked as incorrect.

Bugs:

1. spelling error: Who's flag → Whose flag

2. Nepal's flag shows a white background, it needs to be transparent!

3. There's too much artificial delay, eliminate it to vastly improve the UX. Compare with your competitors; in the time it takes to complete only seven quiz questions on geogee I can tear through dozens of them on kgeography v0.9.

1. fixed 2. cheers. still doing some work on the flags sprite 3. I will consider adding a 'fast mode' in the future

Nice work. What's your stack and did you do the site design yourself? It's quite nice.

Quick comment.

I got 3 incorrect questions on population wrong.

In the "try again" mode at the end, I couldn't actually remember which ones I answered incorrectly for each question.

So it might help to indicate which answers you already got wrong in that phase.

Thanks. Totally agree. I've been considering on how best to handle that in a way that helps the user learn. The game is still very much a WIP and I hope to have an update to the that feature quite soon

I got a question about the Chinese flag. It being black stars for some reason, I thought it's another country and guessed wrong three times. Check your flags, something seems to be wrong with the colors.

ah, thanks. Not sure how i didn't notice that one. There are a few rendering issues with some of the svgs because I am rendering them as a svg sprite. Will add that to the list of fixes.

I made something similiar, but it is not nice looking like this :/

Found a bug: https://imgur.com/a/mVVi5a8

Very cool though! :-)

same https://geogee.me/-ze-a1-ac-za-a2-a4-za-a3-b8-zg-af-bd-zg-b5...

Nice one. I do take a bit of a risk by lazy loading some SVG sprites. Guessing that's the cause here

Here's another bug: SVG of the Pitcairn Islands flag renders incorrectly on Firefox 63.0.3:

https://i.imgur.com/Xoh51Ui.png

I had the same bug :(

Cool learning game though. will be good for on the train.

I don't see the point of this except it is open-source. Take a look regarding how you load the SVG as well.

What's wrong with the SVG loading? Can you be more specific?

Nice.. sort of like Sporcle in style.

It keeps adding to the URL with every answer... will it eventually crash from that?

featured requested - want list of countries which offer work visa(permits)

It sounds like you might be looking for this Show HN from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640880

Is it open source? Would love to contribute other languages (I am Dutch)

probably not quite open source ready yet but you can keep an eye on it here: https://github.com/whatever555/geogee

Whenever I select an answer I get thrown back to the homepage.

Do you know why?

This is brilliant.

This is really beautiful. And it even made me think about how sad it is to know nothing about so many small, "unimportant" countries. So I bookmarked it, and thanks.

Also thank you for making something that is not yet another app that didn't have to be one. Making a mobile friendly site that looks great on desktop is certainly possible, and that's the side we should err on IMO.

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