Race Game Redesign for Plates Across America®

We've recently finished a significant redesign of our two player "Race" game. The original design would wait until the two players were paired up before starting the game, but this turned out to be a terrible way to introduce people to the game. When a new player encounters the game for the first time, it is better to allow them to begin playing immediately. This was not as simple a change as it may seem: with software, changes are often never as easy as they initially seem.

One of the other design improvements we made stemmed from this Race game redesign. If you are a new player that is unfamiliar with the game, you may be reluctant to start a game without knowing how to play. We added a new "warm up" page where players can try out the word puzzles to get acclimated to the race game and rules before taking on an opponent.

You can start the two-player game here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com/demo/race

Or you can try some warm up puzzles first here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com/demo/warmup

Happy Travels!

The Creative Journey

Whew! 

Over a year ago we wrote about our Plates Across America® game redesign and our expecting it to take a few more months. Well, if you define a "few" as "14", then we were spot on!

We lived for months with everything almost fitting together, but not quite, so kept shuffling ideas and code around. Once we had everything making sense, our early testers told us it was too complicated and it was back to the drawing board. Sometime in November 2021, it all clicked together and a few months later, Voilà!

We have not perfected the game yet as there are game play refinements to be made with help from the feedback of our early adopters. However, the early indicators say this is a vast improvement over our original version.

We encourage you to try it out and send us feedback. We have a very generous free trial period with no signup required:

Link to the Game

 New Features

Some of the features of the new version:

• Travel Goals - visit 10 states, 50 waterfalls, etc
• Bonus Routes - unlock a trip to Hawai'i or Alaska
• Lightning Rounds - limited time puzzles for bonus points

And don't forget about our two-player "Race" game.  That is not much changed from the original version, but is still loads of fun to play with friends and family.

Happy Travels!

Plates Across America® Redesign and Lessons Learned

We've been quiet the last couple months with regards to postings about Plates Across America®. We have been actively working on a major redesign of the game and it turned out to be a fair bit of work, complete with periods of "writer's block". We had lots of ideas for the game, but at times struggled to put them together into a coherent game story.

The initial idea we had for Plates Across America® was to combine solving license plate letter puzzles with the feeling of driving across the USA. Our first version of the game wound up being predominantly about the puzzles and it did not give a player a good sense of traveling. The first version was also too open-ended, requiring the players to determine what their ultimate goal was. The next version of the game seeks to solve these shortcomings.

We've had over a thousand people play the first version of the game. A few dozen found it enjoyable enough to return to play over and over, and a few dozen more more played it a handful of times. This was encouraging, but it also provided a strong signal that something was missing from the game.

Major routes planned for new game design.

The general shape of the new game will be to “complete” the game, where completion will be defined by the goal of having “visited” particular places across the country.  A player will progress through “levels”, where each level will have a smaller goal of travel-based achievement. Traveling will still be done by solving the word puzzles, but there will be more emphasis on acquiring a collection of places visited to meet the goals. For example, when you have visited your 10th National Park, you will move to the next level.

We are pretty excited about how much this will improve the game.  Providing a good "travel" experience means we have more work to do than just writing the software. We'll need more data about routes and locations across the country.  We'll be working on curating this data and writing the software in parallel to help speed things up, but we still expect it to take a few months.  Our game continues to be available to play in its first version in case you are interested in seeing the basic premise of the game.

Plates Across America Demo Game