Review My App:"PG to Alonzo Church?", an iPhone game for the knowledge hungry | Hacker News Reader

Review My App:"PG to Alonzo Church?", an iPhone game for the knowledge hungry

threewiki.com

55 pointsivanzhao42 comments

Just bought it because I literally play this game all the time! Except we do it with whiskey, two random topics (one start, one end) and drinks go to the slowest person to click their way to the second topic.

Edit:

My thoughts: first, great site design and conceptualization (both in structure and looks). I could see the site alone becoming somewhat viral by sending puzzles to friends. Why not let them sign-up/play in a browser too when they hit your landing page? In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was on your to-do list because it seems super obvious.

The app's design is minimalist and gorgeous. It's well thought out. I am super impressed. It may (at the moment) be my favorite app.

Perhaps you should consider adding a random mode... How neat would it be to have a small database of the top 10,000 Wikipedia articles and generate many thousands of 3-degree connections from it. I wish I were you so I could work on this, it sounds fun!

More will come I am sure...

You are right, I intended to make each puzzle page viral, so players could challenge each other. But I am now having issues to bring that challenge back to the game (instead as a Twitter/Facebook message). Maybe Game Center is the only way to go : ( PS. Problems->More->Random, for random problems.

I thought Problems->More->Random just shows you puzzles people have "built" in a random order.

Oh yes. I know what you mean now. Although you can pretend the humans are computer algorithms : )

wow whiskey gamer. I should put you as a testimonial.

Hi guys,

This is a side project of mine, just launched yesterday and I'd like to share with you. Here are some promotional code (US only), comment out the one you take please

I would also appreciate you to leave an App Store review (so important in the early stage of the app.)

Ivan

---- Promote code, one per person ------

JWPHYFA3WP3N

WHP43NLYEWNT

A4NM4YEYP6W7

WYERTFK6XLXX

MATKAYT6RYJJ

WPP6WJFKR63X

----------------------------------------

* UPDATE: the game just made into the top 10 in the "Trivia" section & top 25 in the "Educational Game" section : )

Thanks for sharing these. I bought the app instead because of.

I used A4NM4YEYP6W7 and left a review. Very cool app and an awesome polished UI. This is going to be my go to time waster now.

Hi there, can I have a couple promo codes, would like to check it out. Thanks

Have an awesome day!

:-)

Jaime E

Used WPP6WJFKR63X I'm really excited to give it a try. Looks fun. Thanks!

Thank you, I just used WYERTFK6XLXX and left a review. Looks great!

Just used the first one: JWPHYFA3WP3N. Checking it out now.

Used MATKAYT6RYJJ. Looks like a great game. Thanks!

I took WHP43NLYEWNT. Thanks a lot Ivan! :)

A suggestion, if you're interested.

The pop-up on a wrong guess is a little heavy-handed. It's ok for the first time, but sometimes I would actually like to go to the article.

Maybe allow the person to browse to it, but mark the link with a red thumb-print on click (to mark the ones viewed), and have the wrong page show up with a different style?

You might be able to add this into an additional stat/achievement: "Wrong turns taken."

Good suggestion. I am also thinking about a "View Original Article Mode", so you can explore the full articles on demand, and not restricted to 3 degrees.

I don't own an iPhone (or even a smartphone) but this looks really fun, and something I would purchase and actually play.

I watched about 3/4ths of the demo video but wasn't able to ascertain if problems can have multiple correct "paths" or how it might evaluate those paths with respect to correctness/scoring. This question arose when following the Alan Turing -> ? -> Libido problem, as this would be one potential example I could imagine having a couple different paths, and I'm sure there are many others like that. Can you explain how the app handles such scenarios?

As long as you can reach Libido from Alan Turning, it's fine, doesn't matter which route you take.

However, it's only limited to 3 degrees so there are not too many options, and you won't get lost in the wiki world either.

Meta point: I have Flash disabled on my Mac. The picture of the iPhone 4 with the text "Flash Player 10+ Required" superimposed on top of it is hilarious to me.

May I recommend you offer an H.264 video file as well?

I used Vimeo for the video hosting. They have HTML5 but for some reasons it doesn't show up properly in iPhone : (

Although works in iPad.

I'm on a 15" MacBook Pro: mid 2009 running Snow Leopard in Safari 5.0.1. I've simply ripped Flash out of my system.

Seems similar to http://thewikigame.com/ which has been around for a long time and offers a free, realtime, web-based version.

Yes it's very similar. But The Wiki Game randomly generates problems, while all problems in this one are created by players, rated by other players in a HN/Reddit manner.

Bravo... for the clever use of targeted landing pages.

This looks like a lot of fun; but it won't start on my original iPhone (1st gen). If i can help debug this somehow, email neonskimmer at gmail.

I just bought it and found it wonderful.

Great design... actually amazing...

What is that font?

Baskerville for the title. Minion Pro for the menu buttons (better legibility on older iPhones)

What about for the content text? It's nice.

That's plain old Georgia, although slightly off black for the print looking (something like #222200)

Nice use of CoreText. You seem to be one of the rare individuals who can apply a design aesthetic and execute the coding. Congratulations on a beautiful app! Love the pop-up hints.

Thanks for your kind word; truly appreciate it.

Found a bug - Genghis Khan -> Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) Tried to find the answer -- chose "Show me the answer" - Kara-Khitan Khanate.

Tried it and it doesn't connect -- did wikipedia change it in the meantime?

No I cached the wiki page on my server. Sometimes it's under a different title because of the redirect. Genghis Khan -> Kara-Khitan Khanate -> Jurchen (Jin Dynasty)

My girlfriend bought the app as well and loves it.

She has a request though:

She wants to be able to follow through on the second page links even if they are not the correct answer.

It looks very well made. Good job!

However, shouldn't it be "Two degrees of Wikipedia"?

Yes indeed. 3 is a better number though : p

Just bought it, and I must say that it’s a brilliant app. A lot of fun in perspective.

Spot on Ivan! Looks a lot more polished than when you showed it to me a few weeks ago.

I'm addicted.

FYI, there's a typo on the tutorial. "pefect" on the finish screen.

This looks wonderful. I'll buy and review in a sec.

Very nice. How did you record the iPhone demo?

looks great - excellent work

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