Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia

detective.wiki

318 pointsjasonsmiles43 comments

Hi HN! Worked on this side project for a while and wanted to share it. It's free to play.

This is beautifully designed and engaging and potentially a fun way to learn things! Amazing work.

Some things you could add to make it stickier:

1. Have a natural end where you "win" - possibly I just didn't hit this, it's the kind of game I'd play in bed in the morning as long as the play time was similar to Wordle and the other NYT games.

2. Have facts show up when you get something right! Could literally just be the opening sentence from the article and a link to the article. This extra context stimulates curiosity - I'd love to be able to have "Space physics? That doesn't sound like a real thing..." and then have the hat guy pop up and go, "You cracked it chief. Space Physics is the study of high atmosphere plasmas."

EDIT: for comparison, have a look at Metazooa - https://metazooa.com/ - which did this very well.

Cool game, but when I was doing the map game it gave me the same article about 5 times.

It's also not clear if there's a goal in each game. So far as I can tell it goes on forever.

Edit: both the lock and dial game modes put me into the same dial game mode; I'm going to guess it's a bug. They also seem to be for the same article.

Same here! I got the Parthenon five or so times. On the bright side, I know very well now that the Parthenon is not actually in Athens!

It is, though? I also had the same map come up about five times, showing a picture of the Parthenon and the Athenian acropolis, but it consistently insisted that these were of Orchomenos, which also had an acropolis but AFAIK is not the same; they are about 80 miles apart.

edit: it appears that Orchomenus also has an area of the city that Wikipedia refers to as the acropolis; I'm wondering if the game pulls the acropolis data from the Athenian Acropolis but then mistakenly attributes it to Orchomenus? I thought it might be because some great physics discovery was made there (given the daily challenge genre) but I haven't seen anything.

It's not?

I also played the map game, and in addition to getting the same article several times I got two articles that had some of the same photos but whose locations were ~100 miles apart.

After nine rounds it suddenly ended and I was confused.

I played the Map mode and got the same page several times, and then the game ended with half my "life" left. It was really fun but I passed a lot of rounds just on memory

I played the map mode and got a map, with labels!

I've played one game of ransom. This is fun but I have some comments/suggestions.

1. Letters are sometimes barely shuffled 2. Sometimes same clue with different redacted words come one after another so you know which words are redacted 3. Sometimes (foreign names for example) the answer is not redacted due to accents. Same for similar words (complexity uncensored for "complex system"). Sometimes picture or video contains answer. 4. I guess you use some popularity metric for articles? I got Greece, ancient Greece and archaic Greece, though the topic is allegedly physics? Maybe filtering a bit more would be better 5. Before I started game I didn't know how long it is supposed to last. Apparently it's indefinite, and I lost on purpose to verify it. 6. Some feeling of progression with harder tasks would also feel nice.

Hey sometimes the "first letter" in the letter game when it's typed on the tape is in upper case .. kind of a hint :)

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

Pedía Vikki

This is sick! I love the idea.

Two pain points: - No "reward" after guessing it even completing. If based on Wikipedia, give me some facts about the places! (Even if wrong imo) - I did the physics map daily. I got the same location 4 times in a single play. Definitely need logic to prevent doing the same location to the same use in a certain time period.

Where in the wiki is Commons Atribution?

Really fun, took me over 20 articles before I realized I can just type the letters on my keyboard instead of clicking them one by one with my mouse :^).

As the other commenters, I liked the concept. I did the map, and got quite a few repeated answers.

I then did the ransom one, but I did quite well until I got definitely bored around round 70. I think 100 rounds are too much, at least for the daily game.

What a wonderful game. Great animations and simple interactions. Could you share something about how you've built this @jasonsmiles?

I'm guessing it scrapes Wikipedia for a topic and then digests it, converting it into informational cards.

Design is super cool. Still dont understand what the goal is, at least for the map i was guessing the location every single time because most of the pictures are of the location. Maybe i am misunderstanding.

Was able to get a lot of the guess-the-word one just based on it being an anagram. Might want to throw in a few decoy letters?

Good bit of work. I certainly enjoyed ten minutes with it. Like other comments here, I'll say that a lot of the same things kept coming up. I got Athens and Iraq multiple times. It might be worth spending a little time to "curate" some sets of articles or even put together an LLM agent for doing so.

This is really cool but the execution is a bit cludgy at the moment (it looks great but the games themselves are confusing / too easily messed up). if polished up I could see it being really popular a la wordle.

Very cool idea. A few bugs I found.

I was doing locations. I got something that looked like the parthenon. Like an idiot, I clicked Rome. Wrong. Chalkida, Greece.

Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Chalkida. Wrong. Orchomenos.

Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Orchomenos. Correct. And the accepted range was a huge square, covering most of Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean. Chalkida would have been within it as well.

So the location seems inconsistent with the pictures and the same pictures kept showing up.

This is a very clever idea. I've toyed with the idea of making a multiple site mystery challenge in the past, a bit like a geo game with real world tagging and drop boxes.

Never got around to it, but this is clever.

I can't play the game because the whole screen flashes in rectangles

Yes, could not continue, that was too much.

Very nice, but I did end up seeing what rude words I could make.

The answer and next buttons could be clearly separate from the other UI, and they could also be the same button.

After my first answer, I just got ”Something went wrong…”

Love it. Great idea.

Design suggestion: The home page "START" button looks more like a logo (in the BOWLARAMA vein), my eye skipped right over it.

What a beautiful idea! Really nice job for the UI

the sounds are nice and satisfying too

Very cool - I would like to contact you about this. Do you mind emailing me? My email address is in my profile.

This is really cool, recommend people click 'restart' so you can see all the different gamemodes.

If I had children I would force them to sit and play this for an hour every day. Bravo pal.

Great design and work overall, excellent project, congrats!

This is very cool! I am mildly disappointed that it isn't called Wikipedia Brown. Despite this, great work

What a great design!

How did you design that awesome background!?

This is incredible, bravo.

A pure passion project!

should be able to scroll between images on mac not drag

Nice!

Thank you, OP.

Incredible

congras!

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