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Thanks for posting Richard. I enjoyed the game, though I didn’t do as well as I might have. Here are some thoughts , in no particular order: It certainly showed a need for me to learn more of the words underpinning the binomial system, because many meant nothing to me. I found it incredibly frustrating that I only ever saw a blurred image, and TBH honest I’m not sure what the benefits of that of that are beyond making the game more difficult. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d have liked to have control over the geographical region and perhaps be able to start closer to home. None of the species shown are likely to be ones I’ll personally encounter, in that respect it didn’t seem very motivating. I’m glad it was easy to shut the sound effects off, I didn’t like them though I recognise I’m not in your demographic. Overall I thought it was fun and easy to use. I wonder though what the learning outcomes are supposed to be. Thanks for the opportunity to see this, I hope you find the feedback useful. Good luck!
I just tested it, it’s very fun and interesting, I used to play those games for hours when i began. Sadly, I’m French, and do not know any english names… Do you think that you could get the french / any other language vernacular names from inat data base to offer an international experience ?
I would totally make a drinking game out if this !
An issue that I found kept coming up is using different common names than I’m used to for some of them, so I’d know what the animals was, but not see it on the list because the common name used was different.
I like the idea, but the number of options feels too overwhelming and many of the hints don’t narrow it down. The second hint (location and blurry photograph) has never helped me.
Could you make every round much more like the multiple-choice quiz it switches to at the last hint? You could then adjust the difficulty in response to the player’s accuracy - start with 2 or 3 options, and if they start getting them right offer more optinos and make them more taxonomically similar.
There are other ways you could do this, but the point should be to help players think about taxonomy and which species they think of as similar to each other. I’d really like to see this game succeed in this.
Did you use genAI to write the hints? It seems to be full of garbled claims – for example, Mycteroperca microlepis was alleged to be both a “deep sea predator” and “common in coral reefs”. I guess it’s sort of true. This grouper lives at different depths during different parts of its life. But I think “deep sea” usually connotes depths in excess of 200 m, quite a bit deeper than usual for this fish.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Really means a lot.
In a previous version of the game I also included the family or class of animal in clue 1. Do you think that’ll soften the blow a bit for how hard it is?
Now that there are a lot more animals in the game (first version only had 150) it might be worth unblurring the photo as there are usually a few animals that it could still relate to. But I would most likely make some animals super easy to guess (eg: giraffe or hippo etc…) But maybe that’s not a bad thing.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to narrow down the locations a bit more, but I’d need to restructure most of the code in order to do that. Will keep thinking about this!
In terms of learning outcomes, my hope it to make knowledge of scientific names and animal locations a bit more understood. But also to just showcase how much variety there is in the world.
I’ll investigate how easy it’ll be to include different language versions of the game. At the moment I’m using the iNaturalist API with a Google Spreadsheet which has the animal categories, emojis and clues. I think it might be possible to use that system for different languages.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Happy drinking!
Thanks so much for playing! Could you give me an example? That’ll help me tons.
I might be able to add a column in my Google Spreadsheet for the common names which can then be searchable - should be pretty easy to do I reckon. If you think that’ll help, then I’d love to make that change.
If the photo was unblurred, so you think it’ll make the game more fun? Or too easy?
In terms of making each round multiple choice, that would require a complete restructure of the code and game design, but I’ll try think of how I could incorporate a way to scale the difficulty and adjust it based on the players average score. That would mean it’ll be easier for players who find it harder, and tougher for players who find it easy.
Thanks for the suggestions and for giving it a spin!
I’ve used Googles assistant to help me with some of the clues but I’ve tried my best to go through each one to see if there are any obvious errors. My knowledge of each animal is improving but I still have to rely on a lot of Googling and hoping my clues are correct as there are over 650+ animals in the game. I plan on adding a ‘flag’ button to each of the clues to help users identify which ones are inaccurate. Thanks so much for the feedback.
It’s a fun game with a lot of promise. I like the UX a lot. The categories are little funky though - the bird categories make no sense to me, and there’s no consistency whether a rodent is in Rodents or Small Mammals. Also Hyenas aren’t canids ;)
I understand you’re trying to avoid complex groups and terminology to find the animals, maybe just use mammals, birds, reptiles, aphibians etc?
It would be nice to see all previous hints(at least the scientific name and location in the bar at the bottom and maybe a pop up you have to click to show the text based clues) at the same time instead of clicking back through them,
unblurring the image at 1 point makes sense to me and a different type of blur would be nicer
I got one where the location was “unknown wilderness”, when I could definitely give the location a name, assuming this happens when an inat obs does not have a location description, a fix for that would be nice.
Separate leader boards based on region selected or a lack of selection(worldwide) would make sense to me but doesn’t seem to happen
Lastly, is the countdown at the start necessary for some back end operation? If not, it is slow and distracting for me.
