Show HN: Trailmarks – Huge, browser-based, Carmen Sandiego-style travel game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trailmarks – Huge, browser-based, Carmen Sandiego-style travel game

trailmarks.earth

19 pointsmatsxmats11 comments

I'd love to have people test-play my Carmen Sandiego/Backpacker style travel game. It's a retro genre... but if you like geography and quizzes, you'll like this! It's a working alpha with most of the content I intend to add, but I need to have people give it a try now before I decide which directions to fully develop!

I'm torn between putting effort into missions, more advanced in-game trading economy or creating more of a narrative. But I'm also curious if you get the navigation, if the core gameplay makes sense and if you want to continue playing, basically.

Hope you find it worth playing. It's a pure browser game with no login, you're playing for free immediately in this alpha! Please feel welcome to DM feedback or reply or anything!

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Nice, definitely gave backpacker vibes.

Some issues:

- It doesn't "feel" like a game, it felt a bit aimless. Maybe some missions like travel to X countries, do Y things, within Z starting budget. - The "X" at the top of the screen feels disjointed. - The popup covers the pin sometimes. - I wanted to click the departures to travel onwards. - Clicking the true/false feels odd, I was not sure whether I correctly guessed or not sometimes.

Is this genre alive at all nowadays?

Trying to make this genre come alive again with this! :)

Your feedback is noted! I have a mission system (bottom right corner), and indeed one thing I'm wondering is if I need to deck it out and make more of a fuss about it. I think you're right - it will help in making it a game. Thanks a lot for bringing it up. And thanks for the UI feedback too!

I took the initial "type" to be more of a difficulty or question-types, not about missions. Even so, clicking the bottom I get this:

> The mission of your game. Complete all your levels and achievements, and you can return to London a success. Can you go to London yet? Nope!

Which is both confusing (I am in London) and aimless ("Do everything"). Definitely needs some more attention.

I also wish I could click-and-drag the cards, or simply click to focus, keeps tripping me up.

Ok, great to know. The achievement logic is half-baked because I don't really know if people would care or not. The way I'm reading you it sounds like you, at least, would like to see it more fleshed out. Which is cool, I got a ton of ideas for it!

Why would you like to click-and-drag and focus on the cards? Where would you drag them? This is interesting, I haven't thought about this at all.

It's a view of cards, so I want to pull them left and right, I guess.

And.. well, I personally probably won't play it to be honest. Maybe if I had kids and the experience was a v1.0 instead of v0.2 I would be interested. Even then, it would be relying on my nostalgia around the Backpacker games. I'd definitely recommend getting feedback from people expressively interested in it.

This actually amused me for a few minutes - I played Carmen Sandiego last in the very early 90s and I got a nice nostalgia hit from this. OIDC logins and a backend where you can store progress and achievements would be a nice addition. Heck, even storing the data in my local browser’s store would be okay. :-)

This is fun, though I will note that when traveling, my new location didn't factor in, and all my locations were based on my initial locale.

Might be me being a firefox user.

Edit, tried in Chrome - still didn't work.

Oops, thanks for letting me know. Of course I had to introduce a bug when putting it live. It is fixed now, hope you'll enjoy a nice trail of pins across the planet ;)

How did you create the questions? I get that they are AI generated but how do you avoid halluciniations? They seem solid enough.

Thanks for asking! A few different things, and it's probably not perfect yet. But a few things:

+ I've worked on a quiz app for a year so I have a bit of a polished prompt + writing good example questions + letting the AI choose the quiz topics + double checking with a different LLM. So GPT 4.5 reviewed questions from Claude and so on.

I think the percentage of hallucinations are at the same level as something written entirely by humans now.

(And now I’m off to search for Backpacker on board game geek…)

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