Typewar (By Eldarion) | Hacker News Reader

Typewar (By Eldarion)

typewar.com

41 pointstwampss46 comments

This is really cool. My only comment so far is that the first 9 levels are REALLY slow. My patience was sorely tried in getting high enough for more fonts to appear.

Either I'm a huge font geek or this is too easy.

Loads of geeky fun; I hope some more typefaces are thrown in there at some higher levels!

a new typeface is introduced every odd level

Two things that would improve this tremendously: 1) More difficult questions sooner and 2) Force you to start over after N wrong answers so the score matters

Given that I know almost nothing about fonts and didn't miss a question in the first 5 levels, I think it's far too easy.

Really liked it! However, it was too easy, even on level 19 (where I stopped playing). New typefaces should perhaps be released every level, and only give sans/sans or serif/serif alternative answers to each question.

I like the idea, it's fun, addictive. Well designed. But it's too easy if all the questions are being answered correctly by 95% of users... I'm at Level 5, 75 points, and all the questions (save one) so far were aced by >95% of players. (For that one question, which 45% got correct, I had to think pretty hard though). And it would be more challenging with more fonts. And up the challenge -- compare more sans-to-sans and serif-to-serif for instance.

Agreed - too easy. I didn't miss one and got up to level 5, 93 points. 3rd-4th level should be comparing sans-serif to sans-serif, not serif to monospace. IMHO. Make it harder! Cool site, though.

As you get to higher levels you get more fonts unlocked, plus lower case letters, and other challenges. It gets harder :)

Agreed. After level 1, it's a bit silly to give a serif and sans-serif choice for a letter, unless it's O.

level 5 is very early in the game and we wanted to err on the side of starting off very easy

Because you saw fit to mention your company in your submitted title, I gave your page a look. I'd never heard of Eldarion, but Pinax sounds vaguely familiar. I'd like to make a request, though, and that's for you not to highlight text so obnoxiously it looks like links. The only four links you have on eldarion.com look like they're not links. It's pretty, but it's bad design.

actually this story was not submitted by me or anyone from Eldarion

Oh, okay. My site criticism still stands.

text-decoration:underline clears things up pretty well

It's redrawing the screen on every submission, instead of doing the submission in an XHR. This is one place where Ajaxiness would really help, because the only indication you have that you've submitted a score is to look at the browser bar to see if the page is loading.

Also it wouldn't kill my history/back button

I scored perfectly and got to the 5th level (didn't feel like registering).

I don't understand how people cannot tell the difference between these fonts! Even Arial and Helvetica I find are easy to differentiate if you look at the angles.

some letters are easy, like R or G and some (as you mention) you can tell from the angles of the terminals but there are some that are pretty much identical

Well. It is nice that is shows success rate of other people, and it's quite sad, that most of questions really are trivial (helvetica vs. times new roman), those with > 90%, and some are basically undecidable (50% -- that is as good as random).

And there are just not enough interesting questions, you are just choosing between courrier and times new roman, even at 9th level. It's boring. But with enough data, you could choose just the interesting ones.

yeah, that's one of the enhancements we plan to make.

Is there any difference at all between those two: http://typewar.com/stats/glyph_pair/X/Helvetica_Neue/Verdana... ?

How many trivially easy questions do I have to answer before hitting the hard stuff? There either needs to be a way to adjust levels manually or some sort of learning system to put you at an initial level.

At around level 7-10 it gets reasonably hard, but you have to login with a twitter account to get past 5.

I understand the frustration, but the purpose is competition (typeWAR). You'll get there.

Still, but I'm on level 7, have answered all 150+ questions correctly, and I haven't gotten any questions that involve type families other than Helvetica Neue, Times New Roman, and Courier New.

i'll investigate but by level 7 you should be seeing 6 different typefaces

we're going to experiment with having easier pairs come up less often. we just need more data first.

Fun little time waster. I like the concept and implementation (although it's a bit easy as others have said). My only suggestion is to provide a login method besides Twitter. OpenID would be great.

I guess the competition is going to get a lot stiffer now that its out of alpha. I wonder what the world will be like now that so many more people will know the difference between Didot and Verdana.

Might I suggest always alphabetizing the order that the two family names appear in? It's disconcerting to get the same options two questions in a row, but to have their locations swapped.

they are deliberately ordered randomly

At least, when you have the same pair of typefaces twice in a row, can you make sure the positions are the same? If I get two questions in a row with the same choices and with the same answer, then I should be able to click in the same place!

I'm always getting stuck on the Courier New vs. Helvetica Neue ones.

Courier New is the "Typewriter" style font.

I think you mean Verdana vs Helvetica Neue. There's no way you got Courier New mixed up with Helvetica.

Courier New seemed to me to be significantly thinner than Helvetica Neue.

Courier New is rounded.

Nice, did you make this? I could post it to a typography Facebook fan page I run (12,000 fans).. if it's ready for wider exposure / lots of traffic.

The site was made by Eldarion, primarily coded by James Tauber (jtauber on here) and Brian Rosner.

by all means post to the fan page! (do you have a link? I might join)

Just posted it: http://www.facebook.com/typography By the way, if you've got any other projects in the works, definitely think about setting up some related (non-branded, such as typography, music, etc) fan pages now. Great way to drive traffic to a new project.

Nice, but I got bored after 7 levels

I actually found it hard

Thanks, good idea !!!

Lol, how easy is this?

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