finally wrote another game (but not Android)

Back in 2006 I wrote a Flash game, sort of an escaper.  In my hackathon fashion, I drew the scenes and worked out the puzzles first so I could download the 30-day Flash trial and learn enough about Flash to create the game before the trial ran out. I had it done in 20 days, a friend hosted it, and people liked it. But it was difficult enough that I didn't really want to do it again.

Fast foward to now, coming up on a year of Android coding under my belt, working with various Google APIs, along with a bit of JQuery and straight Java.  Things make a lot more sense now.  And I come across this neat little game called Pursued, which uses Google Streetview.  You get plopped into a location and you need to figure out what city you're in within a certain time limit.  It's got a lovely, slick HTML5 UI. You get achievement badges for going through themed sets of cities, and it has a separate section for players to add their own games.

Around the same time Yonatan Zunger posted about a game called Geoguessr.  Same general principle, but there's no time limit, and you're shooting for accuracy -- not a city name, but getting as close to the start point as possible.  The UI is less pretty but it's in many ways more challenging.

I mentioned Pursued to Yonatan, saying it would be nice to have a hybrid of the two games, with a slick interface and points for accuracy.  He agreed and suggested I write it.

Well, sometimes I laugh at suggestions.  Sometimes I take them as a challenge.

My all-things-coding tutor, aka boyfriend, has taught me one very important principle: start simple. Don't try to write the entire program at once.  So I got a div to display a navigable Streetview map. Then added a second large map that you could slide in and out from the side.  Then added the ability to drop a marker on that map, calculate where it is versus where the user is, and score it.  Then added another slide-out for an array of pre-set games. And finally some help and credits screens.

And this is all in Javascript, with a bunch of JQuery to listen for clicks and CSS to drive the animations.  Did I mention I don't really know much Javascript?

All in all, I wouldn't say it has a totally slick interface, but it has both a random-location game and a set of pre-set games based on a theme. Plus it scores you based on where you are in Streetview -- for some odd reason, Geoguessr scores your answer based on the original location it dropped you into, even though you might have had to travel for miles to figure out where you are.

I definitely needed help with the trigonometry of choosing a random location and measuring distance (I'm a little jealous that boyfriend didn't even need a refresher).  I received hints and general guidance, and occasionally outright coding. Apparently there are timing issues when you're asking someone else's server to give you large quantities of data: there are things you simply have to wait for, and you can't continue until you have that data in hand, so to speak. He taught me a bit about callbacks and (the formal term escapes me) chaining functions to guarantee one will start executing only after another is finished.  And of course he helped get my AppEngine settings set up so I could upload it there.

So without further ado: MapTag