I started work on the first challenge in my game, The Rapids, on March 8.

That day of work included the creation of two files and the modification of two other files.

At least 100 hours of work later, I have a challenge. And it, you know, works. And people can’t cheat! (Well, I’ll say that they probably can’t easily cheat because I probably haven’t fixed every possible way to cheat, but I did a lot to try to prevent it!)

If I didn’t care about people cheating, I would have had it much easier. The issue here is that people are playing in a web browser. They’re not playing in an environment that I can tightly control, like an app on the phone or an actual application you run on the computer. The text-based games on Bulletin Board Systems, like Legend of the Red Dragon and Trade Wars 2002 and Sky Mountain never had to contend with back buttons and reloading. It’s making me wonder how easily I could port this to an iOS game. I’m pretty sure the answer to that is “not easily”, but it certainly bears more investigation. Any kind of app is probably something to look at for another game in the future, rather than for this one.

As such, I have to bear in mind that the back button and reloading are things that can happen and so I have to account for them.

So the first challenge is implemented and works. Failure has the right results and so do the varying levels of success. And I even partially rewrote my maintenance script so that everything that has to be reset at maintenance does get reset. (And it should be easier to implement more maintenance events going forward.)

More than two months after starting it, I’m basically done. There are a couple of tweaks to make, such as a nicer transition from the normal paddling to the challenge stuff, but that’s… it’s not even secondary at this point, it’s tertiary.

And so now, what do I turn my attention to?

There’s the obvious: the second challenge. But I also have more than 50 open issues in my GitHub repo and should, you know, start looking at those things. I also want to bring the currency (Fire Opals) into the game with more regularity than just doing well in the first challenge. And… and… and… The list never stops.

So rather than think about the literal dozens of things I could do, I spent a few hours on Monday thinking about the second challenge.

Part of my problem here is that I like the idea of a river. And so any obstacles necessarily have to be water-based. And, for best results in terms of believability, should be things you’d encounter on a river.

So the first is The Rapids, mostly based on the rapids up near my parents’ cottage in the Laurentians. Like, that particular set of rapids is what I think of when I’m thinking of the rapids in my game. It was pretty easy for me to say that the key to the challenge about rapids would be answering questions quickly. It just makes sense.

In thinking of these challenges, I also decided that the third and final challenge should be a waterfall. Let’s ignore the fact that I have no idea (yet) how that translates into gameplay.

But I was stuck on the second challenge and only sort of came up with a half-assed idea of a whirlpool. Why? Well, it’s a water hazard that people can easily visualize. How would it play, though? So I spent some time brainstorming and researching and I think I’ve figured it out.

A whirlpool can easily mix things up. It can also pull in nearby items, objects, debris, that sort of thing. So I’m thinking that it’ll be some challenge-specific categories (unlike the first challenge, which draws on the regular categories and questions) that will be all mixed up together, and then, in terms of debris, it’ll be multiple choice, with one right answer and multiple wrong answers. In this way, it’ll be a bit easier, which should mitigate the fact that you’re not choosing your category, like you can with the first challenge.

And, like the prior challenge, very similar (if not identical) rewards. Oh, and it won’t be timed.

So, what’s next? Probably a small release dealing with a couple of small fixes/enhancements, followed by the second challenge. The good part about the second challenge is that most of the database is set up for it already, and I already have a good idea of how to prevent cheating based on the first challenge, so I shouldn’t need two months to get it done. Maybe the end of June is feasible? We’ll see.

In the meantime, all existing users who have completed the intro (and then all subsequent users who complete the intro) will begin at 475km in order to better be able to hit the first challenge at (around) 500km.

Have you tried it out? If not, what are you waiting for?

https://www.riverofkurn.com/

Hope to see you out there on the river!

A friend of mine finally started playing my game this weekend. I’d sent out a general email to a bunch of my friends last September and most of them played around a bit. This particular friend decided to look at it this past weekend and boy did she have some comments!

I have like seven emails from her with various complaints, ranging from what the hell to this is the correct answer to implement a spellcheck.

While I argue that someone who is as much of a Star Wars fan as she is (PS: May the Fourth be with you!) should be able to spell Alderaan, I do admit that the strict comparison I currently perform in the game is a little, how shall I put this, unyielding.

Look, I’ve always been a good speller. I know which to/too/two to use. I know how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism. I know how to spell supercalifragilisticexialidocious. I often take it for granted that other people can, or perhaps should, spell things properly.

So when I was writing the early code for my game, I was like, yes, sure, let’s do a strict string comparison on the submitted answer and compare it with the correct answer and the alternate answer.

At the time, I knew that it would be unforgiving and I thought to myself meh, I’ll worry about that later.

So with my friend having written me several emails to complain, I figure that now is later.

As such, rather than do any of the things I desperately have to do in order to finish up the first challenge, I spent any time coding this weekend on researching fuzzy matching in PHP.

There are apparently four ways to do this. The one that looks the absolute easiest is the similar_text() function. You can use it to compare one thing to another and it’ll give you a percentage of how much it matches. So, for example, if I have “Beverly” as the answer to a Star Trek: The Next Generation question, but someone answers “Beverley”, I can do this:

similar_text(“beverley”, “beverly”, $percent);

echo $percent;

And that gives you 93.333333 (repeating, of course).

So that means that the user-submitted string of “beverley” is a 93.33% match to the actual correct answer of “beverly”.

Using this, I can set an appropriate percentage limit to grant a correct answer. So like, if the limit is 93% or under, then “beverley” will match “beverly” and will get the question correct.

HOWEVER.

A lot of this works on length. So while adding an extra letter to Beverly isn’t a big deal, what about Data’s cat, Spot? If we’re looking for “spot” as an answer, what if someone adds an S and says “spots”? It’s a shorter word, so that only gives an 88.88888% (repeating) match. Should be simple, right? Just set the limit to 90ish percent and we’re good, right?

Well, what if it’s a Red Dwarf question and I’m looking for the answer is “dave” but someone submits “david”? Again, since it’s such a short word and because two letters are different (the e replaced for the i and the d added), this is only a 66.66666% (repeating) match. Shouldn’t someone who types in “david” get points for “dave”?

What about the poor person who typos dave as save? There’s one letter different and so this gives a flat 75% percentage match. While I would argue that save does not equal dave in the least, the S and the D are right next to one another.

What about things that are very similar and yet different? Say I’m looking for ursa major as an answer and someone types in ursa minor. That’s an 80% match. So maybe the match criteria needs to be higher than 80%. But where does that leave us with Dave vs. David, or Dave vs. Save?

Even aside from “what should the limit be”, I’m now also thinking about whether or not there’s a notice to the user that “mmm, that’s not quite right, but I’ll accept it” and then show them the correct answers. Does it matter if someone spells it Beverley if they get it right? Does it matter if they eventually learn that it’s Beverly? How important is that knowledge if it doesn’t do anything different in the game?

And then, of course, one has to think about whether or not properly spelling something should be an advantage in the game. Should I go farther if I can spell Beverly right as compared to Beverley? Maybe I could show a notice saying “mmmm, I’ll accept it, but you’ll only go half as far for this one” and then divide by two and round down to the nearest whole number (unless the number is zero, in which case it would become one).

But does that unfairly reward the good speller? What if I do show the proper spelling, which then gives someone the chance to improve next time?

One of the most fascinating parts of game design, to me, is the question of “sure, I can do it, but should I?”. That question has been a constant presence in the back of my mind since I started out on this project. I can do just about anything. But I’m coming at this from my own biases and perspectives, obviously. As someone who is a good speller, it’s only natural to me that I would want to be rewarded for that. But if I were a terrible speller, I think it would suck to only get a portion of what a good speller gets.

Food for thought!