Scenic Routes in Plates Across America®

In the Plates Across America® game, you (virtually) travel across and throughout the country.  There are the country-spanning routes that serve as the main travel options, but as you travel these longer routes, you will unlock shorter ones, most of which are famous scenic routes and byways.

The Scenic Routes

There are over 180 different scenic routes in the game. These were chosen from some of the popular and most scenic highways and byways that exist across the United States.  Here's a sample of some of the scenic routes available in the game:

Beartooth Highway Blue Ridge Parkway Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway Connecticut River Scenic Byway Country Music Highway Dalton Highway Flint Hills Scenic Byway Going to the Sun Road Great Basin Highway Hamakua Coast Drive Michigan Gold Coast

Natchez Trace Parkway Ohio River Scenic Byway Overseas Highway Pike's Peak Highway Red Rock Scenic Byway San Juan Skyway Selkirk Loop Seward Highway Texas Hill Country Top of the Rockies Utah Route 12 Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway

Scenic Route Signs

One of the main goals of designing our game was to instill a sense of traveling. One way we have done that is to reproduce the type of signs you would see along the way. We have a Blog Article that discusses the road and route number signs we added, but for the scenic routes and byways, they often have their own special sign designs. 

For example, the Texas Hill Country Trail scenic route includes these road number signs:

However, you will also occasionally see these special signs along the way which look like this:

In the game, we reproduce this experience by also occasionally showing the special signs instead of the road sign numbers.

State-wide Scenic Route Signs

For many scenic routes, like the Texas Hill Country Trail, they are special enough that to have a dedicated sign, but not all scenic routes take this approach.  Many states will have their own scenic highway designation with a corresponding state-wide sign. For example, in Colorado, many of the scenic routes, like Top of the Rockies, will use the the same sign as shown at right.

National Park Road Signs

Some of the game's scenic routes are road inside National Parks. These do not usually have any special designation along the road, but we did create a sign for them that fits in with the other signage you typically see along the roads in the parks (see image at right).

Conclusion

We hope this gives you a little extra insight into Plates Across America®.  There's a lot of game design work that went into creating these route signs and though this is not a prominent feature of the game, we feel that these subtle additions are important to give the players a better sense of the traveling dynamics of the game.

If you have not played our game before, try it out here for free:

Play Plates Across America®

Happy Travels!

Game Location Types in Plates Across America®

As you solve the word puzzles in Plates Across America®, you (virtually) travel along various routes across the country and visit thousands of interesting locations. In the game, we have created a number of different types of locations which have special significance. 

Some of the location types are the basis of the game's "Travel Goals" that help you win the game, while other types will unlock extra game features. Here we give an overview of all the various location types found in the game.

Collectible Location Types

To win the game, you must achieve 63 travel goals to complete building your flag (13 stripes + 50 stars = 63). Some of these travel goals require visiting a certain number of given location types. For example, visiting 25 state capitals, 10 caves, 5 ghost towns, are some of the possible Travel Goals. (You can read more in our Travel Goal Blog Article.)

Below are the 9 different collectible location types that serve as the basis for Travel Goals. The image to the right shows the icons we use to represent these location types:

Bridges Caves Ghost Towns Mountain Passes National Monuments

National Parks State Capitals Tunnels Waterfalls

Remaining Location Types

There are dozens of other types of locations, many of which will unlock a "Lightning Round" when visited. (See our Lightning Round Blog Article for an explanation of that feature.)  A few of the more interesting ones and their icons are shown below.

In all, there are 44 different types of locations in the game. Here's the full set of them along with the icons we use to represent them.

Conclusion

We hope this gives you a little extra insight into Plates Across America®.  There's a lot of design and data work that went into creating these location types and though this is not a prominent feature of the game, we feel that these subtle additions are important in giving the game more visual appeal.

If you have not played our game before, try it out here for free:

Play Plates Across America®

Happy Travels!

Route Number Signs Add to the Travel Experience in Plates Across America®

New Mexico

In Plates Across America®, we want the game to give players a true sense of traveling. We've added a number of features and visuals to help achieve this, including the route number signs you would see as you traveled. This was a painstaking process of both creating the images and assigning the proper route numbers to each portion of each route.

Types of Route Number Signs

There are 3 main levels of route number signs in the U.S.

• National - There are only a handful of these: U.S. routes, interstates and business routes. There are also a few miscellaneous ones for national park roads, national forest roads, etc.

• 

  County Road Sign

  State - Each state defines their own route signage, so there are 50 variations needed. Some are elaborate, some very simple and many in between. And in some states, like Texas, they have a lot of variations depending on what type of road it is designated (e.g., ranch road, farm to market).
• County - There is a county-wide standard for what county road signs should look like, though this has not been universally adopted. For the sake of the simplicity, in the game, we assume all states have adopted this standard.

Designing Route Number Signs

Florida

When considering national, state and county road signs, we ended up with 68 variations. However, this is just the number of different "styles" of signs and each of these can have hundreds of different route numbers appearing on them. If we were to create a different image for every possible combination of style and number, we would need to create many thousands of images. Just creating the 68 styles would be time consuming enough for us.

Our solution to reduce the number of images was to use a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) for the style and then use the SVG layering ability to drawn text characters on top of it for the route numbers. The route numbers could be anywhere from 1 to 4 characters, so the font size and position would need to be adjusted depending on the number of characters. Fortunately, the SVG format gives some help in allowing us to do this, so it was less tricky than it could have been.

The other big consideration that the SVG helps us solve is web site responsiveness. Scaling images and especially fonts to all the device sizes out there is important for the game's playability.

Assigning to Routes

Minnesota

Plates Across America® has nearly 350 different routes, however, these are the game's concept of "routes" which are not the same as real life routes. In fact, a single game route may traverse many different (real) route numbers. We needed to go through each of the game routes and find all the route numbers that have to be assigned for each segment of the route.

We used Google Maps to find the real-life route numbers and our internal route editing tools to encode them in the game. Interestingly, Google Maps has a similar problem in showing route numbers for states and counties, though they chose *not* to use different styles for each state like we do. When you look at Google Maps, round circles are state route numbers, while square route numbers are county roads: this is true for all states.

Colorado

When we encoded the route numbers in our editing tools, we used a convention of combining the "style" (e.g., state) and the route number. For example, "i-95", "tx-2222", "ca-1", "county-34a".  Our software would then parse the style from the number, choose the right style SVG and then render it with the text of the route number depending on how many character were in he route number. In order to have the number fit into the image boundary, we have to scale down the font size more for a 4 digit route number than for a single digit one.

Conclusion

We put quite a lot of effort into these route number signs even though they are not a major part of the game. However, we felt that in order to recreate a real sense of traveling in the game, a lot of these small and subtle details needed to be included.

If you have not tried our game before, 

Try Plates Across America® for free.

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

 

Mileage Signs in Plates Across America®

We release a minor update of Plates Across America® today which adds road mileage signs. On some of the longer routes, this helps break up the trip and give you a peek into the upcoming cities.

Frequency of Mileage Signs

We tried to make these to increase the sense of travel of the game without being a distraction. This is a balance in how frequently these signs should show up. We also did not want to manually generate these signs across all our routes, so we needed some sort of algorithm. We wondered if real civil engineers face a similar problems when they have to decide the signage to put on roads.

We settled on putting the first sign about 10 miles into the route and spacing them about every 30 miles. We think that provides a good distance between them and matches our intuition about what our real-world experiences have been on the road.

Which Cities to Show on Mileage Signs

After we decided where to place the signs, we approached the somewhat more complex decision about "what" should appear on the signs. Which cities warrant being on there and which ones do not? The size of the city certainly matters, but so does its proximity to the current location.  This initially seemed like it could get complicated with a lot of nuances and edge cases. In the end, we found something relatively simpler that seems to do a decent job of mimicking the real world.

We use a two pass solution, looking for major cities first, out to the fixed distance of 120 miles, and then filling in minor cities between the the current location and the first major city. A major city is defined as one that has a population over 250,000.  If there are no major cities in the next 120 miles, we simply take the next 3 largest cities to show.  Simple, but seems to be effective.

Click here to try Plates Across America for free and let us know what you think. 

About Plates Across America®, Our Travel Themed Word Game

Plates Across America® is an online game that combines solving word puzzles which appear on license plates with traveling across the United States along some of its most famous routes.  We provide a free demo which does not require signing up and a free trial of the full game if you register.

Free Plates Across America® Demo

Respect For Privacy

The Plates Across America game is being developed by a family-based startup. We are trying to buck the "free game" trend where the cost is "free" only if you put zero value on your privacy. This might be a tall order in today's Internet environment, but we are going to try. In a world where "Spying on You" is replaced with jargon such as "Analytics" and "Re-targeting", we deliberately avoid tracking your every move. This decision limits the types of data we have access to, but when weighing the value we (the company) get against the cost to our customers of surrendering their privacy, we feel the answer is quite clear.

Word Game with Virtual Travel

We began software development of the game in the Spring of 2019, though the genesis of using license plates as a source of word puzzles goes back many years in our family. By 2019, we thought the clever word puzzle idea combined with aspects of virtual travel would also have some entertainment value for others. Here in the Spring of 2020, as we were getting ready to put out our first release, the global pandemic has hit hard and the world is a very different place. If anything, the popularity of "virtual travel" has increased. Maybe this will increase the value some people find in the game, or at least help them pass their quarantine time more enjoyably. For us personally, developing the game as a family has been much more fun than watching the constant, and often depressing, news cycle.

In its current web-based form, the game is enjoyable for those who like word games. We will be continuing to improve the game play to make it more enjoyable, accessible and hopefully to broaden its appeal. We have a long list of exciting future features and only wish we had enough time to work on all of them.

Happy travels and stay safe!

Notes from Our First Release of Plates Across America®

We reached an important milestone today in the development of the Plates Across America (TM) game. With today's release, we added a very useful interactive free demo and we've completely redesigned the user interface.  Although the first "soft release" happened a few weeks back, today's release is the first one that is ready for more than just friends and family. Feel free to check it out here:

Game Screenshot

Plates Across America Free Game Demo

For those that might be interested in the game's history, the basic premise on the word puzzles stretches back years. This seemed novel and catchy enough that we saw potential. Somewhere around March 2019, the word puzzle idea was combined with the travel theme and the game started to take shape. Initial prototypes and algorithms were developed in the ensuing months, and work toward building the web-based version started in the Summer of 2019.

The web-based version is just the starting point to help us get up and going quickly so we can refine the ideas. Once we feel it is refined enough, we will be creating mobile app versions.

If you try our game, we would love to get your feedback.