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Comment by adamlynch | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback. I'm considering adding difficulty modes or a way to change the radius. I'd rather that people wouldn't get a perfect score too easily though

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I think it’s more important for the game to be meaningful than difficult. How well do you know a neighborhood is deeply meaningful. How well do you know 2.5 neighborhoods isn’t. I’d strongly recommend sacrificing difficulty for meaning here.

This is relative to the density of where you are playing. The default radius out in rural areas doesn't have enough roads, for example. A customizable radius or geofence sounds appealing.

I agree (and what you want out of the game). I wonder is there a "number of streets" which is a better sweet spot / a better default, rather than a radius

For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%

A geofence matching the city limits would be great

Right now there's no backend but potentially I could have a leaderboard per geofenced city / town

It’s def a good positive reinforcement to give people a good feeling that they know their own neighborhood.

Having the next 1.5 neighborhood is also valuable: if you live so close, it’s not a stretch to go learn the neighboring neighborhood (in fact, why not!?).

There maybe a level of “insult” (you don’t really know your ‘hood outside of the 5 streets), but used positively, I think the game is great.

I enjoyed it! worked reasonably well for the city I tried. I did have a few nitpicks, but they are mostly datasource related as opposed to anything you can control - the several rounds i played included a pedway system, several walking trails, and a private driveway. Only change I might suggest making is the radius of the pin - getting a 99/100 for being 6m off because the pin didnt go exactly where I thought it was. Or is there any way for the pin to snap to an object?

Can you give me the coordinates you played in? I will review the "objects".

I can do something with the pin too. Probably not possible to snap though, no.

Thanks!

> Can you give me the coordinates you played in? I will review the "objects".

Here's the osm for the pedway object, labelled a footpath. https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11909462

Here's one of the trails: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/511807176

Thanks! (https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-hand/issues/18)

Fixed!

I want to chime in as well to say I felt the circle was too large, I know districts in cities vary in size a lot but, but the game covered ~6 with mine in the middle. Checking the village I grew up in also covered the edges of three towns around it and a neighboring village.

Thanks. For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to make it adjustable in the future.

I think it would be useful to use actual boundries of villages or neighbourhoods instead of circles. Not sure how difficult that is. (the required data is in OSM, at least in germany)

The data is there but it's difficult to make everyone happy. I don't have a backend but if I did, a leaderboard per town would be nice

I think a difference with Wordle is that we're playing different neighborhoods and different streets every day, so a "cheated" perfect score would have little meaning. And I think when people share their Wordle results, it's often a "wow, I lucked out on that guess" or "phew, almost didn't get it".

Perhaps the ability to choose the sample area could be based on the zoom level and hidden under a settings cog?

For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to make it adjustable in the future.

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