I like the game a lot, it would be great for students. My only issue is that the tips/tutorials when starting the game partially cover the text box that describes things about the organism, making it hard to read the full description given. Otherwise, it is great and enjoyable!
Hey everyone!
Thanks so much for the feedback. In light of the comments around the categories, I’ll be releasing a new version tomorrow these categories, which should hopefully make things a bit easier to navigate:
Amphibians
Arachnids
Bats
Bears
Bees, Wasps & Ants
Beetles & True Bugs
Birds of Prey
Bovids & Deer
Butterflies & Moths
Canines
Crocodilians
Crustaceans
Equines & Suines
Felines
Fish: Freshwater
Fish: Marine & Reef
Flightless Birds
Gamebirds
Lizards & Monitors
Marine Mammals
Marsupials & Monotremes
Molluscs
Mustelids
Pachyderms & Giants
Primates
Yes, personally I thinkclass would be a better clue for me than the scientific name and I’d have loved to have got an easy one like hippo or giraffe 
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Actually, I had another go and found an option to change region right at the start. That made it feel a lot more comfortable, and potentially useful to me.
I did wonder, if a learning aim was to help students remember some of the scientific names, if it would be useful to add some information about the meanings of certain word-parts when the result screen comes up. Not a lot, and not necessarily every time. But just a little to help give some structure to this learning. Perhaps something like this:
- Iberian Grey Shrike, Lanius meridionalis - Meridionalis means Southern or South.
- Saddled Seabream, Oblada melanurus – Melano means Black
Finally, I just wanted to say that I read back my initial feedback and thought it sounded a little negative (and I’ve probably added to than now). I didn’t mean to sound negative, because I really do like your game, just keen to give some pointers.
Thanks
Jarvo
there are lots of things don’t make sense to me about the design of the game:
- why even hook onto iNaturalist observations? iNaturalist gives you a wealth of images, but you’re picking only one observation per round, and you’re not even showing the image until the end. you might as well have just gotten range maps from iUCN and images from Wikipedia or something like that if you wanted to show location and image. at least that would be more likely to give you a representative range and image, rather than just some random iNaturalist image and location.
- it’s strange to me that you start off with the scientific name of an animal and ask folks to guess the common name. that seems like exactly the wrong thing that you want kids to do in the long run. seems like both names should be presented side by side, or the scientific name should be allowed to be guessed after the common name is guessed for extra bonus points.
- is this overall gameplay flow really helping kids to learn? i’m not an educational games expert, but i’m guessing that kids would learn better by getting some structured lessons to learn about a set of animals first and then getting quizzed on a few of those afterward. you start off with cute kid-friendly graphics. that sort of thing can go a long way getting kids to explore. maybe create some sort of flow where the audience can explore some set of lessons. maybe after completing each lesson, they get some sort of progress point, and after a certain number of points obtained, they get a rewarding challenge that they can get mega points for completing correctly?
- for a game targeted at kids, i’m surprised you’re asking for the sorts of logins you do. this presents all sort of issues with parental controls and age verification and name moderation that i don’t think you handle well, if at all. just for example, imagine that some troll goes out there and logs in with a name that incorporates a four-letter word, and gets a high score. now all of a sudden, all your users are presented with that in the leaderboard that they see on the page.
if you want to see a game that i think really takes advantage of the data in iNaturalist in a logical way, you should take a look at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inatguessr-can-you-guess-the-location-from-the-observations/44518. i’m not sure this is necessarily a game that’s good for younger kids, but i’m sure it could be adapted to make it so.
This is so cool! Common names are extremely variable though, so please be careful when choosing them. There is no such thing as a “universally accepted common name”.
I would love to see plants get some love though…
I didn’t take notes on which ones this stood out with.
A possibility is to have alternate common names come up if you hover over the species name given.
Many species have 4 or 5 frequently used common names in common use in English alone.
I played through about 5 species, and think it definitely has promise. I would definitely have liked this game as kid. A few comments:
I would combine the first and 2nd clues, so that the full location and scientific name show up at the same time. Or, have the range of the organism show up as the 2nd clue, with just the scientific name as the first clue. Right now the 2nd clue seems to add no new information.
Maybe this is already fixed in the next version, but right now “Crustations” is spelled wrong.
As others have mentioned, perhaps combining some of the categories into larger bins would be helpful. Having things at class or order level could be helpful, especially if this is paired with teaching kids about an introduction to taxonomy. Even the updated suggestions are a bit all over the place, with just two categories for fish, but nine for mammals..
Thanks for the honest feedback everyone. I appreciate both those that have liked the game and those that have found it frustrating. Negative feedback is a great way for me to learn and course correct, so I honestly do appreciate it.
My hope is to incorporate as much of the feedback as possible to make the game a better experience. I’ve learnt a lot during this process and value all your input.
A last question, if you can make this game, wouldn’t it be possible to make a trainging game out of it ? With full unblurred picture and location and you have to guess the species. It would be a good way to train into birding, insects or plants
Hi Louanum, I’ve launched a new update last night which unblurs the image and places a binoculars vision around it. Hopefully it feels a bit closer to a real-life animal sighting.
I’ve also completely rehauled the categories to be more taxonomically correct.
The clues are still:
General Location + Scientific name
Accurate location + Binocular vision
Clue 1: Habitat
Clue 2: Size & Diet
Choice of 5 animals
Slowly trying to make it a better game.
Chhers and thanks for playing!
This “binocular vision” is worse than before, moves around too much and much too fast, it was better fully blurred
I got the same organism back to back, seems like a bug
As others have mentioned the categories you have are not intuitive or evenly divided, makes it annoying to use
The Countdown between rounds is still slow and annoying
I think there is too much emphasis on vertebrates, and many of these categories are of limited utility. I think this would be a better system.
Arthropoda, Tardigrada, Onychophora, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Loricifera, Kinorhyncha, Priapulida, Mollusca, Annelida, Nemertea, Rotifera, Platyhelminthes, Gastrotricha, Rhombozoa, Micrognathozoa, Chaetognatha, Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Phoronida, Chordata, Echinodermata, Hemichordata, Xenacoelomorpha, Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Placozoa, Porifera.
Phyla are the primary units of the animal kingdom, so it would be fitting for these to be the categories.
Wouldn’t many of these names be meaningless to schoolkids though, I doubt many could name a Loriciferan. Also some groups are bigger than others, I think naturally Arthropods should have multiple groups and probably vertebrates too.
Vertebrates being most common on the game makes logical sense in the eyes of a school kid, most animals they could name would be mammals or birds, not Beetles or worms.
While presenting the completely factually accurate version obviously makes the level of information better, the idea is to educate while not overcomplicating. Given the demographic, I think semi-scientific is the right way to go.
Anyhow, I will be following this project in the future
As others have mentioned, the user interface is great. I briefly tried on the phone and Europe as a region, it worked well and was entertaining. I could see it as a nice tool to remember scientific names of different species. So not just for kids 
.
For kids though, I think asking the species is a bit ambitious, perhaps family and genus is good enough, but since you don’t have different competing species in the same genus it doesn’t affect negatively the experience. I just know most inexperienced people get overwhelmed by binomial names but are familiar with orders and families (common names not scientific ones, that it), so it’s an obvious starting point.
Great work!
Same, got several times the same critter.
Perhaps. But even still. There are a lot of reasonably common non-vertebrates that a child/casual could conceivably easily encounter that arent on there. Orthopterans, myriapods, annelids, echinoderms, cnidarians, and such. And I do think the mammals and birds are far too oversplit no matter how you slice it.
You dont have to say the scientific name for each category obviously. You could say orthopteran as “crickets and grasshoppers”, echinoderm as “sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers”, etc
Perhaps for invertebrates you could have moths+butterflies, beetles, dragonflies+damselflies, true bugs, wasps+bees+ants+sawflies, grasshoppers+crickets, miscellaneous insects, spiders, scorpions, misc. arachnids, millipedes, centipedes, decapods+mantis shrimp+phyllocarids, peracarids, non-malacostracan crustaceans, echinoderms, gastropods, bivalves+misc. molluscs, cephalopods, annelids, cnidarians+ctenophores, sponges and misc. animals?
Then vertebrates could be cartilaginous fish, ray-finned fish+lungfish, amphibians, lepidosaurs, crocodiles, songbirds, galloanserans, misc. neoaves, palaeognaths, marsupials+monotremes, ungulates, marine mammals+elephants, carnivorans, small mammals, primates.