With the release of Plates Across America®'s new Race game feature, we also introduced a new "Race Completed" page. This new page becomes accessible after both players have completed the race. This page shows the outcome, stats for the race, your stats against this opponent as well as the full puzzle and answer history. It is the Answers feature of this page that we felt was worth writing a little more about.
As we were discussing the design for the Race feature, once this idea was proposed, we all immediately felt that it would be incredibly interesting and useful to be able to compare your answers with your opponent's answers. You can use this to improve your game or just to see what sorts of words your opponent decides to use.
This comparison works well since each player is shown exactly the same puzzle sequence, so you can really compare apples-to-apples (so to speak). Notice that one user may see more puzzles if they require more to complete the route.
We think Answers comparison is one of the more interesting features of the new Race game. If you try it out, please let us know what you think.
The first version of the Race Game feature existed long before we released Plates Across America and it was quite different from what we now have. The original feature allowed up to 8 players and offered in-game chat messages. It was set up to be much more like a "live" race with entry fees and prizes for the top 3 finishers. This was a pretty interesting "race-like" idea, but not very practical for this type of (somewhat leisurely) word game.
Requiring all players to be on-line at the same time and to remain for the duration of the game was a bit too constraining for a word game. We ditched this idea before the first release and decided to launch the game with just the solo "Travel" mode. Meanwhile, in the background, our game designers were re-thinking how to reintroduce a multi-player version back into the game.
For the publicly available race feature we just released, we now have a 2 person race game which allows you to play a specific person, or you can allow us to find a matching race partner (we'll discuss how we pick partners in a future article). For fairness, each player will get the exact same sequence of puzzles in a race and they can completed it at their own pace. The winner of the Race is the person who completes the route in the fewest possible puzzles. If there's a tie on the puzzle count, the percent correct score is used as a tie-breaker, and if that too is the same, the game ends in a tie.
Another nice feature is the ability to select your preferred race length. The choices are: short, medium, long and extra long. The race route will be chosen randomly from the routes based on their distance and your preference.
Want to know how Plates Across America™ decides which license plate to show in the game? If so, then read on for all the nitty-gritty details. First, we will give you a some hints on some upcoming features since they are directly related to license plates.
Every state (and D.C.) can have multiple license plates. Further, each license plate has two important attributes: 1) what years the license plate was in use; and 2) how common the license plate was during that time. In our early versions of the game, neither of these is much of a factor since we only have a single plate for each state. However, we are working on extending the set of license plates in the game and will be working this into some interesting new route concepts.
With that as some background, when a new puzzle is displayed, exactly what happens to decide which license plate to show? First, we look at your avatar's current location in the game. Most of the time, you get a plate from the state your avatar is in (and eventually the "time" you are in). If there is more than one plate for the state (and time), then we'll randomly pick one based on how common it is. To simulate what you might experience in the real world, we look at your immediate location (in the game) and a few mile radius from where you are. When you travel in real life, as you near the borders of states you tend to see plates from the neighboring states more often then if you were in the interior of the state. In the game, the likelihood of seeing a plate from the current state or neighboring state depends on how close you are to the border and the relative populations of cities in that area.
Most of the time we look at your avatar's current location, but not all of the time. Ever see a car with an out of state license plate from far away? We simulate this in the game by occasionally picking a state from the other states. In the real world you are more likely to see plates from places like New York, California, Florida, Michigan, etc. because those places simply have more people which increases the likelihood that a visitor is from there. It is much less likely to see a plate from North Dakota given how few people live there. Therefore, when the game does decide to pick from other states, it does so based upon the relative populations of the states.
So there you have it, the full details of how the license plates get picked in Plates Across America™.
The "skip" tokens allow you to exchange the word puzzle with another one without penalty. The boost token allows multiplying your reward for a correct answer, but beware, it will also multiply the penalty if you get it wrong.
We have also rolled out a series of achievement recognition badges and a page where you can see all of the badges you have earned. A sample of one of these pages is below. We are really excited about the features in this new release. We hope you can give Plates Across America® a try to see for yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
