Plates Across America® New Membership Levels

We recently launched a new multiplayer version of Plates Across America®. This new mode of playing is geared toward playing in groups be it families, friends or work teams. With that release, we also introduced new membership levels tailored for group play.

Membership Benefits

The "Plates Club" is our membership program that helps unlock additional game features. You can play much of the game without becoming a member, but membership gives you the following added benefits:

• Premium vehicle avatars. As you earn points in the game, you can use them to upgrade your vehicle avatar and accessorize it. Membership allows you to choose from a wider range of vehicles and accessories.
• Bonus routes. All of our major, main routes are accessible to all players, but many of the additional bonus and scenic routes you encounter along the way require membership to unlock. Traveling on these additional routes allows you to add to your collection and reach travel goals more quickly.
• Additional daily group games. Anyone can play our multiplayer group game, but are limited to a few a day. With membership, you gain access to play more group games per day.

Individual Membership

This is the membership level we have have always offered which is limited to one person sign ups.  We retained this for those that predominantly plan to play our single player travel game and are not interested in adding more members to their account. 

Friends & Family Membership

This new membership level is intended for families and small groups of friends.  When you join at this level, you can invite your friends and family members to join your account and get the same member benefits.

Team Membership

This level is aimed at larger groups including large families and work teams.  With this membership level, you are able to add many more people to your account to get the same member benefits.

Why is Membership Required?

We love creating Plates Across America® and want as many people to play as possible. However, to keep the game running requires us paying a service to host the game. The more the game is played, the more it costs us in hosting fees. For this reason, we have to put some restrictions on free playing. The membership program is how we allow more playing without the risk of going bankrupt.

Final Thoughts

Although we encourage people to sign up for membership to help support Plates Across America®, we also make a good portion of the game available to anyone. We hope that after playing the game that you enjoy it enough that you will want to access the extra benefits that a Plates Club membership offers.

Whether you are interesting in joining our Plate Club or not, you can play the game for free using these links:

Single Player Game

Multiplayer Game

Happy Travels!

Multiplayer Word Game

We've recently released a new multiplayer feature of Plates Across America®. Previously, we offered a two player, head-to-head version of the game, but we have now expanded this so that up to 10 users can play at a time.

Family & Friends

We had noticed our game being played as a group with multiple family members contributing answers to a single person playing the game. Everyone wanted to make their guess.  This made the group game seem such a natural and obvious feature that we are somewhat ashamed to have taken so long to get around to it.  All of our previous user testing was focused on one person playing the single player version. Naturally, this new feature is not restricted to just families as it can be just as fun for a group of friends to play. 

Inviting Players

When you start a multiplayer "group" game, you have two ways you can invite other players:

• send them a link that allows them to join your game; or
• have us send an invitation email.

The first one is best if you are all together at the same time and can easily share the URL with everyone. Depending on your perspective, it can be an advantage or disadvantage that anyone who gets a hold of that URL will be able to join.

On the other hand, the email invite option allows you to invite people and notify them directly about joining your game, even if they are not online at the time.  Another possible benefit of this approach is that the link they receive in their email only allows that individual to join. Even if they share the URL, it will not work for anyone else.

Warmup Puzzles

One concern we had with the multiplayer game is inviting new players into a game without their being familiar with the rules. No one likes to compete when they are at a disadvantage like that.  To help new players get over that uncomfortable feeling, we create a special practice "warmup" page that allows them to read the rules and try their hand at some puzzles before heading into a group game.

Warmup Puzzle Page

Two Player Game

The two-player game is not very different from a group game with two participants, though we differentiate this for one important reason. With a group game, you manage and invite the players, but with our special two player version, we will automatically find you a compatible playing partner.  We call these auto-assigned games a "Race" and use a checkered flag icon to help differentiate them from other group games.

For races, we use sophisticated, next generation AI to match up players...or really, we don't, it just seems the thing to say nowadays.  However, we do have a player matching engine that compares player skill levels to help pair them up so the games can be more competitive and fun.

Online Team Building

Another good benefit of our group game is that it can be used for online team building. Remote working is here to stay and this means that more and more teams are looking for online group activities to help team members get to know each other better.  There is no shortage of articles suggesting activities for online team building, but frankly, we find most of them fairly corny, not universally applicable and often heavily skewed toward extroverted personalities.  

Though word games like Plates Across America® may not be everyone's cup of tea, we are confident that our game is far removed from the "corny" category, is more inviting than many alternatives and is a whole lot of fun for word game enthusiasts.

Final Thoughts

The group games are still a relative new feature, so we will be refining it as we get user feedback. Please have a try and let us know what you think and whether you have any suggestions to improve it. You can try it out here:

Group Game Page

Happy Travels!

Lightning Rounds

With the revised version of Plates Across America®, we introduced a new feature we call "Lightning Rounds".  This gives you 5 additional puzzles to solve to get some extra points, but there is a catch: you have a limited time in which to solve each puzzle. The effect of adding a timer changes the dynamics of the game considerably.  The brain is a funny thing: time pressure tends to reduce how well it works.  

History

Before we released the game to the public, the timed puzzle concept was in consideration for use in the entire game. We experimented with various timer durations and found as they got shorter, the anxiety it produced for players was sometimes overwhelming. Some people would get visibly upset and seriously stressed and this was just playing a demo of a game.

We eventually abandoned the timer for the main single-person game, though we retained it for the two-player game. A timer is necessary in multi-player games or else you potentially have one player getting frustrated with the slow play of the opposing player. However, with our latest redesign, we have re-introduced the timed feature for the single-player game, though in this limited way with these Lightning Rounds.

Lightning Round Triggers

The Lightning Rounds will show up when you reach some types of interesting locations: tourist towns, quirky roadside attractions, hot springs, etc. You can now choose to accept this adrenaline charged challenge, or decline it each time it is triggered. By playing the Lightning Round, you can accumulate more "ride points", which you can use to customize your vehicle. You can also choose to stop the Lightning Round notices from appearing to you.

Duration of a Lightning Round

You are given the choice of 3 levels for the Lightning Rounds from hardest to easiest, where the amount of time determines the difficulty.  The less time you choose, the more ride points you can earn.

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 Americe's® Badges and Achievements

Achievements Page

When you play Plates Across America®, you will earn "badges". Some of these are directly related to the single-player game's Travel Goals, some are earned for achievements in the two-player game and a few others for players that make contributions to the game.

Since it takes a while to accumulate all the different types of badges, we thought it might be interesting for newer players to see the full set of our badges and to find out how each one is awarded. We add new badges from time to time, so there may be new ones by the time you read this article.

Achievement Levels and Coloring

For all the badge types, there is a range of achievement levels. These levels will correspond to some minimum value needed to earn the badge.  As you reach higher threshold values, the color of the badge reflects the increasing achievement level. The coloring scheme for the achievement levels is shown in the image below for the Miles Traveled Badge.

Types of Badges

Miles Traveled Badges

We start with the simplest one to understand: the miles traveled badge. This is based on the total number of miles you have traveled while playing the single player mode. The achievement level thresholds for this badge are 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and 10000 miles.

Collection Badges

The core concept for winning the single player mode is the "Travel Goal". You can earn Collection Badges as you reach travel goals. Examples of travel goals are:

• states you have traveled through;
• license plates you have collected;
• scenic routes you have traveled; and
• locations you have visited for the different "location types".

Here are examples of some of the badges you can earn as you achieve travel goals.

Location Badges

As you travel in the single player game, you pass through (or near) cities, landmarks and other man-made, natural and geological places of interest. You can collect these places to reach different Travel Goals. The kinds of places you can collect include:

• state capitals, 
• national parks, 
• national monuments, 
• bridges, 
• caves, 
• ghost towns, 
• mountain passes, 
• tunnels, and
• waterfalls.

Two Player Game Badges

When two players compete against each other, we call this a "Race". In a race, each player is given the same 10 puzzles. There is a time limit for each puzzle. The player that enters the best answers wins the race. You can get badges for competing in and winning enough races.

User Contribution Badges

The final set of badges we have are not for in-game achievements, but are for players that have helped improve our game. There are a few ways users can help to improve the game:

Dictionary Words

It is more challenging than you might think to build a good dictionary, and even harder to get a large group of people to agree what should and should not be included in a dictionary. Therefore, we acknowledge that at any point in time, our dictionary will not be complete and it will evolve. Because of this, players can suggest words to be added to our dictionary.  

When your answer is flagged as being incorrect because it is not in our dictionary, we provide a link you can use to submit it to us. We review these submissions and if the word is accepted and added, we acknowledge your contributions with the "Pit Crew" badge.

City Facts Badge

As you travel in the single player game, your pass through and near cities, towns and other locations of interest. To add to the feeling of virtual traveling and to provide players with some interesting context on the places being visited, we have a "City Facts" feature that gives some interesting trivia, facts and history of the locations. 

There are tens of thousands of places across the country, so it is hard to know about each and every one of them.  However, if a player is acquainted with the area, they may know something interesting about it that we do not. In the game, we allow players to contribute and share that knowledge by sending it to us for review.  We will research the suggestion and if it is accepted, we acknowledge the effort with the "Historian" badge and also give attribution to the person that submitted it. 

Early Adopters Badge

Plates Across America® has evolved a lot since the early versions. We constantly iterate to make the game better and better. We can only do that by having real players try out the game and give us feedback.  Some give us explicit feedback, while others provide it indirectly by what they do and do not do as they play the game.  

To thank those people that have played earlier versions, we give them the "Trailblazer" badge.  The earlier a player joined, and the more they have played, the higher the badge level.

Closing Comments

We hope this overview of the game's badges was informative.  If you have never played Plates Across America® before, you can start acquiring badges by playing here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com

Happy Travels!

Earn Travel Goals to Win in Plates Across America®

As you play Plates Across America®, you can win the game by reaching a series of "Travel Goals". Examples of Travel Goals are:

• collecting 25 license plates;
• visiting 10 states; 
• traveling 20 scenic routes; and
• visiting 50 national parks.

Travel Goal Types

There are 12 types of Travel Goals:

Bridges, Caves, Ghost Towns, License Plates, Mountain Passes, National Monuments, National Parks, Scenic Routes, State Capitals, States, Tunnels, Waterfalls.

Travel Goal Levels

Within these types there are 8 "levels" of achievement based on the quantity collected.  The quantities for each type can vary depending on how many appear in the game. For example, since there are more bridges than states, the levels for bridges are 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 150, 200 while for states it is 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50.

Winning the Game

If you do the math, there are 96 possible Travel Goals in the Plates Across America. Because the game has many routes to choose from, the routes you choose will dictate which travel goals you can achieve. When designing the game, we did not want "winning" the game to consist of reaching all 96 Travel Goals. We wanted to give you choices about what routes to travel, not to require you to travel all of the routes. 

The game also has a leader board to show who has reached each Travel Goal first. If we required reaching all the Travel Goals to win, then everyone would need to take every route, with no freedom to choose how they want to win.

Therefore, we designed the game so that you only need to reach a subset of all those goals to win. Specifically, we require 63 goals to win the game. Why 63?

Travel Goal US Flag

We wanted to provide a fun, visual representation of a player's progress in the game. Sticking with the "America" theme, we landed on using the American Flag. Each star and stripe represents one of the Travel Goals, and that is where the game winning number "63" comes from (13 stripes + 50 stars = 63).  The flag starts greyed out and the color changes as you reach each travel goal. When you win, the flag will be red, white and blue.

In case you are thinking of asking: yes, we would have to revise the game if more states were added to the union.

Disrespecting the Flag?

Although the U.S. Flag Code is included in Federal law, it is not mandatory, uses non-binding language and prescribes no penalties for violating it.  Thus, it is more of a suggested "guideline" than it is an enforceable "law". While not being fined and not having the threat of jail time is a comfort for us, we still do not want to offend anyone: we just want to provide a game that is fun to play and we are not in the business of making political statements.

Whether we are being disrespectful according to the U.S. Flag code depends on how strictly someone wants to interpret it. Ever see an American Flag in a Budweiser commercial or on one of their beer cans?  Ever use a paper napkin or plastic cup with a flag on it at a Fourth of July party?  Ever seen an American flag patch on a baseball player's uniform? These are deemed disrespectful and against the rules according to a strict interpretation of the U.S. Flag Code. 

In our experiences, people do not seem to be offended by many common uses of the flag that could be considered in violation of the U.S. Flag code. How many people even know that using a flag on a paper napkin is contrary to the U.S. Flag code?  

Therefore, we have chosen not to follow the strictest interpretation of U.S. Flag code. Even the American Legion, who were the drivers of establishing the U.S., Flag code (in 1942) had this to say about the use of the American flag in clothing even though the code forbids it:

“People are simply expressing their patriotism and love of country by wearing an article of clothing that happens to be red, white, and blue with stars and stripes."

In the same spirit, Plates Across America® uses the American Flag as part of our game's theme with the aim of celebrating the excitement of traveling the many wonderful places across the United States of America.

Beyond Winning

When you reache 63 travel goals, you have won the game. However, if you are inclined, you can continue playing. You can travel all the routes and reach all the Travel Goals.

If you have never tried our game before, please try it out here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com

Happy Travels!

Dictionary Improvements

We recently made some big improvements to the Plates Across America® dictionary. Our game's dictionary is the critical starting point for the word puzzles that appear on the license plates.

Starting State

Before the latest refresh, our dictionary had 99,857 words. This generated 14,900 unique word puzzles with a little over 8 million possible solutions across them. These numbers sound relatively good, but as you will see below, we needed an even better game dictionary.

We formed the initial dictionary from multiple non-commercial sources since we had a very limited budget when we first started creating the game. These "free" dictionaries all had some quality problems, so we opted to use them all in a "voting" scheme where we (conservatively) only included words that we saw appearing in multiple dictionaries.

In Game Improvements

Because we took a conservative approach, we knew the dictionary had gaps, so we added a feature to allow users to suggest new entries from within the game. If the game flagged your answer as not matching (because it was not in our dictionary), you could click a link to notify us and we would then review it. We built tools and a process to review player suggestions and add them to the dictionary. We even added a special "badge" (at right) to recognize the player's contributions.

As more players joined the game, our queue of suggested dictionary additions got busy. Reviewing these confirmed our suspicion that we had gaps. We realized that the gaps might be bigger than we expected. The dictionary issues were becoming our biggest problem to address.

Dictionary Improvements

Since we first built the dictionary, we have found a few other freely available dictionaries. The best one we found had some issues of allowing some hyphenated words and capitalized words (proper nouns), which are not valid answers according to our game rules. However, the number of good words it had was significant, so we decided to take the bad with the good. We'll eventually remove the bad words, but we felt being more liberal about what is included in the dictionary was a better decision. Our first attempt was way too conservative.

Our resulting dictionary has 172,584 words. On first glance it looks like we added 72,727 (172,584 - 99,857). However, during the dictionary upgrade process, we detected 21,072 "bad" words in the original dictionary. Thus, this new dictionary source effectively added 93,799 new words: double the size.  This new dictionary bumped up the number of possible word puzzles to nearly 16,000 and the total solution count across them to just shy of 15 million.

Conclusion

All in all, our dictionary was significantly transformed and improved with our latest efforts. For those that played our game and were flagged for wrong answers for valid words, we wish we could go back in time to prevent that, but at least we have made some strides to prevented it in the future.

If you have never tried our game before, please try it out here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com

Happy Travels!

Designing the Vehicle Avatars for Plates Across America®

The vehicle styled avatars in our game was one of the last big features we added before we undertook our recent, major redesign. Not only can you choose which type of vehicle you want other players view for you, but you can also customize your avatar with different paint colors, accessories and modifications. Many players liked the vehicle avatars so we did not change it at all when we recently relaunched with our new version of Plates Across America®.

Back when we added this feature, we created 16 vehicle types since we wanted to give you a wide variety of avatars to choose from. We still have a long wish list of vehicles we want to create and add. In the coming weeks, we plan to add a number of new vehicle types, so stay tuned as we roll them out. These will all be fun additions to our vehicle avatar choices.

Below, we give a brief "behind the scenes" look at the process we use to create these vehicle avatars.

Designing the Avatars

Idea Phase

Cars, bikes and trucks are rich areas for ideas, especially when you consider not just the contemporary offerings, but all the vehicles throughout history. There are also appearances in popular culture to add to the richness of choices. Thus, coming up with the initial ideas is easy, but there are some limitations to consider:

• Variety - we do not want to have avatars that are highly similar, so we try to find a "category" or "type" that is distinguished from the others.
• Copyright - as much as we would like to offer avatars like the Batmobile or other vehicles from popular culture, we also very much like not being contacted by lawyers with cease-and-desist letters or seeking royalty payments.
• Priority - we needed to consider which vehicles will have the most appeal and interest for players.

Sampling Phase

Once we have settled on the type of vehicle, we hunt around the Internet (usually using Google's image search) for examples fitting this genre. We do not use these images directly, but they serve as inspiration for our avatar drawings. We look for images showing a nice clean side profile as that is how all our avatars appear. We sometimes need to horizontally flip the images as our avatars face to the right.

Drawing Phase

We use the open-source program Gimp to do the design (it's like Photoshop, only better). The trickiest part of the design work is planning the "layers".  

We use the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format to render the avatars on our website and Gimp supports this with its "path" feature. The SVG format is more flexible that using plain old GIF, PNG or JPG images and it allows us to more easily provide the customization feature. We actually use multiple SVG images, one on top of the other, so that we can "insert" an accessory or change color. For example, look at our convertible avatar below:

Notice the black door guard band across the body. When you change the color of the car, we want only the body to change color and not the door guard, i.e., we want this:

We achieve this by putting the body drawing on one layer and the door guard on a layer above it. Then we can change only the body color, redraw and the black body guard is rendered over the body's yellow coloring.  

This layering approach is a common pattern used in most design software, including Gimp, so we are able to create each SVG layer in its own Gimp layer. Notice that the rear view mirror of the vehicle is also in the upper layer and gets drawn over the body color too.

We also have to consider the customizable accessories for the vehicle when we plan out the layers. For example, adding purple stripes like this:

means we need another layer between the body and the door guards since you probably would not paint stripes over the rubber door guard in real life.  When a vehicle has lots of different accessories, the layer planning gets more complex.

Coding Phase

We then use the "export path" feature of Gimp to output a separate file for each SVG layer. These files will become part of our source code. Inside our code, we maintain a list of all available vehicle types and what accessories it has. We add the new type to that list, its accessories and include the names of all the new SVG files. We also set the game cost for the vehicles (in "ride points") and decide at what point in the game the new vehicle will be "unlocked" and available. Vehicles get unlocked in groups as you reach milestones, so here we determine which group it should be in.

We have a special vehicle test page which allows us to view the result and visually verify it before we make them part of the next game release.  An important part of this visual verification is to make sure the left-facing, mirror image looks correct.  In our two-player game, we render the player's avatar in the default right-facing view, but their opponent is mirrored so that the avatars appear facing one another.

Conclusion

We hope this glimpse into the design process for our vehicle avatars was interesting. It can sometimes be a tedious chore to draw out all the layers of a new vehicle, but it is always exciting at the end when it all finally comes to life as a new avatar choice in Plates Across America®.

If you have never tried our game before, please do here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com

Happy Travels!

Plates Across America's® Trip Check Feature

We recently introduced a new feature we call "Trip Check". Every 10 puzzles, Plates Across America® now reports how far you have traveled from your answers to those last 10 puzzles. You can track your game progress for the day, the week or for all time. There is also a new Trip Check leader board so you can compare your scores to other players.

We had gotten feedback from our players that something was missing in the single-player game. Something was needed to break up the longer routes and to be give more discrete feedback on a player's game progress. This is what the Trip Check feature is meant to address.

Trip Check Dialog

After every 10th answer, you will now see a dialog as shown on the right.  This tells you how far you have traveled since the last Trip Check. It tracks your best score for the last day (24 hours), the week (7 days) and for all time.  

The feature saves the best scores for all players, so during the Trip Check you  can see how your latest score compares to all of the best scores and let you know if you have beaten any of them.  

When you achieve a new high score, you earn points which you can use to help customize your vehicle avatar.

Stats

Whenever you want to see you best daily, weekly or overall Trip Check scores, just visit the "STATS" page under the "MY STUFF" menu option (see below).

Leaderboard

The new leaderboard page shows three columns, one of the daily, weekly and overall best scores. It tracks the scores for all players so you can see what you need to score to climb up the leaderboard. You can access it from "TRIP CHECK" in the "LEADERS" menu bar option (see below).

Final Thoughts

We are pretty excited about this new Trip Check feature. Our preliminary testing showed it to be a compelling addition to Plates Across America® and our initial user feedback has been very positive.

Try out this new feature here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com/demo/puzzle

Happy Travels!

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!

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

 

Free Games are Not Free

Imagine you are out shopping and are browsing through the aisles of your favorite store. After a while, you glance over and notice someone standing further down the aisle. They are staring at you and holding a clipboard. You were so distracted with what was on your mind that day that you just noticed them and you are not sure how long they have been there. Have they been watching you the whole time?

You bend down to pick something off the bottom shelf to look closer.  As you do this, you notice the person writing something down on the clipboard.  You put the item back, glance over and again, they frantically write some more.  You decide to move on to another aisle to escape their gaze. But they follow you, writing more as they go.

Being a little too creeped out by this person, you leave the store and continue your shopping elsewhere. As you enter the next store, you see that same person by the shopping carts. Again, looking at you and scribbling more on their clipboard. It's like the Twilight Zone. You leave the store immediately to drive home, now sufficiently frazzled.

As you drive, you are consumed with the thought of this person following you. Who were they? Why were they following? What were they writing? How did they know where I was going?

As you calm down a bit, you peek in the rear-view mirror. You see this person is now sitting in the back seat of your car. Startled, you scream. You pull over, demand they get out of the car and hand over the clipboard. You see that they have written down your every action. Every store you visited, product you touched, every turn you made in your car, how long you stopped at each stop sign, the radio station you are listening to and which songs you sung along to. The clipboard contains a record of your every action and behavior throughout the day.

The Internet

How would you feel if something like that scenario happened to you in real life?  Would you be tolerate someone recording your every move no matter where you went? Would you allow them to follow you around all day? Would you be happy if that person was selling your information to anyone and everyone willing to pay for it?

Aside from the physical person and clipboard, that scenario is exactly what happens to you every day on the Internet and with almost every web site you visit.  The only difference is that the person with the clipboard is invisible (unless you know how to look). What nearly no one would tolerate in their physical life is being allowed to happen with their on-line life. Practically speaking, there is really no difference between these two scenarios nowadays.

There is a multi-billion dollar market in buying and selling your personal data and that of every other person on the planet. Most web sites participate in either writing on that clipboard, or buying the data it contains.

Should companies with web sites be allowed to

• track your every move;
• share that data with anyone they please; or
• combine that data with the data from all other companies?

Not only do most web sites do this, it is currently deemed as the "right way" to run a web-based company.  The industry acceptance practice dictates that you are not entitled to any privacy. They all put "tracking pixels" on their site which enables them to see your every move. This is not limited to simple things like which web sites you visited, but can include recording every movement of your mouse, where you hover over, for how long and where you click.  The most valuable asset for these companies is the log of all your personal actions.

Free Games

There is a well-known phrase:

"If the product is free, then you are the product."

This perfectly sums up what is going on with the "free" games out there. These are provided by companies that participate in this anti-privacy web culture.  You give up your privacy, they sell your data and you get to play for free.  What we like to say is that for these "free" games:

"They are only free if you do not put any value on your privacy."

Why does it Matter?

Humans are flawed. We can be manipulated to do things that do not make sense, that we do not need to do or even that we do not want to do. Most people would like to think they are immune to this, but no one is. Even the smartest psychologists, who are experts on the topic, admit that even they are susceptible to manipulation even when they know it is happening.  A good reference on the topic is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini.

Deeply ingrained into our mental machinery are things that make us vulnerable to being manipulated. You and I are no match for the corporations that are peddling our private data.  They have got the manipulation game refined to such a level that most people do not even notice it happening. The ramifications are scary. The fact that most people are not aware of this, or do not care about it, is even scarier.

Privacy-focused, Family Values

At Plates Across America™, we do not not engage in any of these unsavory practices and we promise never to do so. The game was conceived, designed and developed by a family (wife, husband and daughter) with the philosophy that we should treat you the way we would want our family members to be treated. We are not interested in selling your data or exploiting you in any way.  We will not annoy you with advertisements, excessive emails, newsletters, on-line tracking, solicitations or any of the other nonsense most other companies seem to think is an acceptable way to treat you.

Focusing on privacy and respecting your inbox means rejecting the current accepted practices of the industry.  This is like trying to swim upstream in a roaring rapids. However, just because it is hard does not mean we cannot try.  We like to think it is only a matter of time before there is a rejection of the current norms and that we will be on the right side of history. Change has to start somewhere, so maybe our efforts can contribute to this in some small way.

Nothing Hidden

We charge a fee for our game because we think the honest way of doing business involves a fair exchange without any hidden costs (such as giving up your privacy).  We aim to provide hours of entertainment, and we only hope for a very small fee in return.

A movie gives 2 hours of entertainment and costs $10. A cup of coffee costs nearly $3 and lasts less than a hour.  Our game costs less than both of those and provides many, many more hours of entertainment.

We do not try to trick you into buying the game. We provide a demo version so you can understand whether it has any appeal to you, and then a generous free trial period that gives you access to the full game and all its features. Only then, once you know exactly what we have to offer, do we ask whether you feel it provides enough value to justify the cost.

We encourage you to try our game and support the idea that privacy-focused companies can succeed. 

Start with our free demo:

Play the Free Demo Game

Happy Travels!