Creating a post on Nordinho

Nordinho is kind of an old school forum so things are not super easy to do sometimes. 

You'll need:

• a screenshot of the game saved on your computer
• the URL of the game (copied from your browser)

This should really be done from a desktop computer. It's possible to do it from mobile, but it's definitely harder because of the screen size.

Up near the top of the games list, click the NEW THREAD button.

You'll get the next screen. Write some stuff in the title block (usually the name of the game and the author), and a description of the game. 

You can simply paste the URL of the game directly after the game description. But if you want to make it look tidier, such as a single word "Play" as a button, you can use the link button indicated in the image below. Type the word "Play" (or whatever text you want to use as the button), highlight it, then click the link button.

A window will pop up, which is prefilled with "http://". Since we're in the 21st century and we do things securely now (or at least hopefully), erase that and paste the game URL.

Clicking OK will close that popup. You will see some messy looking text with square brackets and quotes have been added around your URL. Don't delete this stuff, the Nordinho website needs it to create that nice looking link. 

Now you need to add your screenshot. Scroll down until you see "Addtional Options". Click MANAGE ATTACHMENTS.

Another window will pop up. Click the CHOOSE FILE button which will open your file manager and select your screenshot from your computer. Then click UPLOAD. It may take a few seconds but your file name should show up in the area above where it says "Attachment key". Click CLOSE THIS WINDOW or the red X box in the top right. 

Just a note: there are file size limits to what you can upload. If your screenshot is too large you will see an error message show up below the words "Manage Attachments." If that happens you need to find a way to make your screenshot file size smaller before you can use it.

That's everything you need to enter! Scroll down and click the SUBMIT NEW THREAD button and you should see it in the forum right away. 

Ninja Escape by Niwaka Soft - walkthrough all stages

Android app

Stage 1 - Use the shuriken to hit the targets
Stage 2 - Pull the rope 6 times
Stage 3 - Shake your device
Stage 4 - use the sword to kill the tiger
Stage 5 - shake (like a bird!)
Stage 6 - hit the 5 with shuriken
Stage 7 - use the flame to fire up the candle. The candle goes in inventory. Use it to see the Chinese numbers.  This is an equation!
Stage 8 - use shuriken on jar for key.
Stage 9 - swipe left and right to move panels away, then swipe up when you see the arrows.
Stage 10 - enter the numbers on the bottom side of the dice. Opposing sides of dice always add up to 7.
Stage 11 - shake to get the key. unlock chest for a brush. paint the eye on the daruma doll.
Stage 12 - use the shuriken to bring the ropes on the sides down. Pull ropes in order 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1. (Thanks, Angela!)
Stage 13 - click each clock dial so it resembles the corresponding "screw" on the fan.
Stage 14 - flip your device upside down and tap the X (I think) 9 times.
Stage 15 - take the brush and brush away all the black marks. I had a hard time distinguishing when all the black was gone, it took me several tries to get it.
Stage 16 - Touch the screen to bring the spiders down, then use the shuriken to kill them in the order indicated.
Stage 17 - move the candles around so there is the indicated quantity in the box.
Stage 18 - turn your device upside down to show 3 0. Shake it to get an arrow. Tap the circle 3 times.
Stage 19 - take the bucket and use it on the branch.
Stage 20 - 704. I brute forced it, so I don't have an explanation for that number. (Edit: apparently the symbol on the banner is supposed to be *, as in multiply, so 88 * 8.
Stage 21 - slide the panels to the center in the order shown.
Stage 22 - take the hook from the left and, using your sword, the rope on the right. It will automatically combine into a grappling hook to use on the ring.
Stage 23 - take the bucket and put the fire out. EZPZ
Stage 24 - Is a little like Simon. Press the 2nd button and a snake (or garden hose?) will pop out from the hole above it. Press the 2nd button again and 2 snakes will come out. Pay attention to which hole and the order, and press the corresponding buttons to get 3 snakes. Once you've gotten all 4 snakes the ladder will come down to exit.
Super spoiler:
2 | 2 | 1, 4 | 3, 1, 2 | 4, 2, 1, 3
Stage 25 - Select the fire tool and shoot the first tube. This will show you which colors to select out of each group of 3 buttons.
Stage 26 - place a red eye on each of the dragons. Swipe them away, then swipe the wall again to get the stairs.
Stage 27 - arrange the sliders to match the heights of the yellow ovals.
Stage 28 - shake your phone to see the symbols on the top of the wall. Click the panels to match.
Stage 29 - use your fire to start the torches, then pull on the rope. Enter the number shown.
Stage 30 - First, the banner shows 2 arrows. Swipe simultaneously using 2 fingers from the center to the edges, i.e. your left finger starts left of the center and swipes to the left edge, and your right finger starts right of center and goes to the right edge. If you've done this correctly, the banner should change to a left arrow. After this, using the same positioning for the swipe -- from the middle outward -- swipe as follows: L L R L L R R L R R. If you mess up it will go back to the 2 arrows and you have to start over again.
Stage 31 - Select your sword and tap on the screen. Arrows will start flying out and your job is to slice them. If you manage to slice them all (they will disappear instead of flying offscreen) you get to the number safe. Code is 332 (again brute forced; no obvious clue except the arrows, which I was unable to count while slicing them).
Stage 32: shake your phone
Stage 33: place the bars on the rack in rainbow order, starting with red at the top.
Stage 34: tilt your phone so that the west arrow points north, then enter the directions.
Stage 35: shake your phone, take the purple ball and place it on the hole. Press the button.
Stage 36: shake your phone to make the warrior go away; shake it again to return with a key. Take the key & shake again to put the key in the lock
Stage 37: the sage advises peace :) set your phone down and wait.
Stage 38: click the circles from small to large.
Stage 39: Shake your device to expose the letters EVE on the banner on the right. The code is a date, the eve of a holiday celebrated nearly worldwide. It seems this has to be the first number you enter, so if you tried others already, restart the level.
Stage 40: touch the small square to the left of the screen to show the code.
Stage 41: swipe the screen in the direction indicated by the deer.
Stage 42: take the gun. Tilt your phone to the left and shoot the ninja.
Stage 43: hold your finger on the thermometer until it gets to the top.
Stage 44: use your sword and slice the painting, then tap the button.
Stage 45: drag the ball to the hole, then flick the arrow in the direction indicated to get a key.
Stage 46: keep "pulling" (flicking) down the corner that hangs down until the screen is torn down.
Stage 47: Turn your device upside down and click the button on the floor. Then turn it right side up and click the button  on the wall.
Stage 48: Shake your device to get the blue ball to drop from the banner. Drag it to the first oval "counter" on the floor. Click the 1st counter once (so there is one star/dot showing), click the 2nd counter once, and the 3rd counter 3 times (3 star/dots).
Stage 49: Turn your device upside down 3 times to light the first 3 candles, then shake for the last.
Stage 50: Tap the figure on the right. There are 3 hotspots that will light the candles, mostly on the left side of the figure.




I got frustrated with this because the game does not save my progress (Nexus 7, currently Android 4.4.2, but it wasn't saving in the earlier version either). Hopefully someone else will be able to finish since it's a pretty nice game.

Tesshi-e game: Escape from Mr M's Room.

This is gonna suck, cos it's a paid game, which means none of the usual ETR players are around to help.

Then again, it sucks that the people who would pay for Tesshi-e's very high quality games are very few.  She's put out 88 free games, everyone loves them and she gets 4 and 5 stars very consistently, but when it comes to paying a pittance (231 yen = appx $2.35, 1.75 euro, you can't get one cup at Starbucks for that), no one's stepping up to the plate. I've even seen people say "I never pay for a game on principle" -- what principles, pray tell, are those?

Anyway. This is not a walkthrough but just notes I took while playing, which make decent hints.

There are a ton of clues. I've found a TV remote, a slingshot with no ammo, a piece of paper, and a bottle opener.

The TV got me a slingshot.  The TV displays a green man puppet on 2 different channels, and the positions he stands in correspond to the 4 buttons where the actual puppet is sitting. Just concatenate those two sequences and you have the answer.

The 3 Mr Birdys on a 3-letter safe correspond to the pillows of the same colors. Each Birdy has a number. That corresponds to a letter in the word on each pillow.  That got me the corkscrew. I sure could use a bottle of wine right now, but I haven't found one yet.

Ah. totally missed seeing a bottle to the left of the TV. A knife now, and with it a spade key, and with that the SD.

Took me a while to assemble the equation for the 4 digit box. You have to cut the paper and place it over each of the pictures on the wall, then reorder the shapes. You get the equation 16 x 5859 / 12, which is 7812.

Used the camera to flash into the dark space. There's a picture showing which corners to click on the rotating picture, and a key. Key gives a handle (box under the sofa).

Handle used on the machine on the floor. Got a ball. Ball goes in the slingshot for a windup key.

Windup key used on the akebekos, 231133, used in turn on the other akebeko. Have a key.

Opened the panel above the bed. Using the card-suit panels I get equations for their value. Also used the cork to slingshot the last panel high up above the sofa. Now I've got more math to do.

Got the equations; they need to be arranged in the same vertical order as the pictures.

Happy coin: check the key.

Fiddling and tweaking

Since releasing MapTag I've made a number of minor adjustments to the UI in response to comments.

However, it doesn't work in IE8 and that will not change.

The more fun part has been adding a visual index of saved games and previously played games which players completed in less than 10 minutes and less than 125km from the target. Click the "more games" tab to view that. It would be nice to dynamically adjust the criteria, but App Engine doesn't allow an inequality query on more than one field. It's a bit of a struggle to understand why it cannot do something that's elementary to any SQL query, until one considers its intended scalability.

So instead, I had to add a boolean field for 'successful', and if I want to change the criteria I have to run a bit of python script* to run through all the records and recompute it.  One hundred twenty-five kilometers is a pretty broad definition of success, but I wanted it a bit broad for countries that don't have a Roman-based alphabet, which is hard for us Roman alphabetters to Google for. For someplace like Thailand, if you get the right country, you still have a chance of "success."

* the server side I originally wrote in Java, but since Python is faster for certain datastore operations, the boyfriend recommended we switch to that. Did I mention I didn't know any Python? or hardly anything about server side programming?

Privacy policy for MapTag

I thought I'd better do one of these for MapTag, too. Same template, different stuffs, more comedy.

I am one human being doing this in my spare time. I'm a geek, which means I'm allergic to salesdroids, which means I would rather spear my own eyeballs out with red-hot pokers than market remotely-related stuff to you. If that's doesn't mean anything to you, here be the legalese:

Privacy Policy for MapTag

• This application sets a cookie which indicates if you have been to the website before or not.
• We do not receive or collect any personal information about you, such as your name, street address, phone number or email address. Google Analytics reports your country language, country, state/province and the nearest city. It also reports your browser and operating system (though not specific versions) and the name of your ISP.  If you live in a town of 50 people we might be able to figure out who you are by asking your kid, or their best friend, who in town is browsing the web using Safari on a Mac running OSX.  Of course, that means actually travelling to your town to ask this question, and frankly, we have better stuff to do.
• We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe we have inadvertently collected such information, please contact us so we can promptly obtain parental consent or remove the information. 
• We do not receive, collect or use your precise geographic location.
• There are no methods of seeing what data we collect from you.
• We may keep data indefinitely, though since we don't use it other than to say stuff like, "Oh, someone from Tanzania is playing, awesome!" we have no reason to keep it.
• We do not get any personally identifiable information (such as name, street address, email or phone) much less share it with other companies.  We might consider making some up, though.  I hear advertisers pay for that stuff.
• We do not knowingly allow advertising companies to collect data through our service for ad targeting. However, be aware that the social media buttons that are included in this game (Facebook, G+, Twitter)  means those social media networks can probably figure out that you played MapTag. If you don't want that, Chrome has a handy extension called Disconnect which disables 3rd-party tracking.
• We take reasonable steps to secure your information against unauthorized access or disclosure. However, no security or encryption method can be guaranteed to protect information from hackers or human error.
• Information we collect may be stored or processed on computers located in any country where we do business.
• We may make anonymous information available to third parties in these limited circumstances: (1) with your express consent, (2) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, (3) when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to protect our rights or property, or (4) to any successor or purchaser in a merger, acquisition, liquidation, dissolution or sale of assets. Your consent will not be required for disclosure in these cases, but we will attempt to notify you, to the extent permitted by law to do so.
• This privacy policy was last updated on 6/4/2013. Our privacy policy may change from time to time. If we make any material changes to our policies, we will place a prominent notice on our website or application. 

If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policies, please contact fallinghawks@gmail.com.

almost ready to submit to the games sites

Changes and additions:

• I did add more locations. I forgot to do Israel, which is a darned interesting place to look at.  We have Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Singapore, and Taiwan.  I also added three US urban areas in an attempt to increase the chances of an urban area being selected: SF, LA, and NY (and surrounding areas of each).  Moscow was already included in the Europe ring. This seems to have reduced the chances of being on a long, straight, empty road.
• I wrote another Javascript/JQuery/HTML file to give players a map, let them navigate in and out of StreetView, and select the location they're at as the starting point for a game.  With huge amounts of help from boyfriend, we got the game storing and retrieving those locations on AppEngine (again! start small! go slow!) And finally I modified index.html to figure out whether it's starting a pre-set game, a user-created game, or a random game.

It's just about ready to release now, I think, with one more fix: if someone calls a game that doesn't exist, the program needs to do something graceful.

Edit, a few hours later: got Israel, got a graceful error message to pop up.  The boyfriend also hacked the page and found he could store junk text in the datastore, but that didn't affect playability. He added code to address the vulnerability and so it seems more or less ready to roll now.

the world is large...

...and has a lot of very straight, very empty roads on it.

MapTag tips (which are really StreetView tips):

There is really no easy way to move a long distance in a single click using StreetView. The step distance seems to depend on how fast the car was going at the time.

The circle, which helps you take the largest step possible, is imperfect. You can't just leave the mouse on the same spot onscreen and keep clicking.  Eventually it will fuck up.  It seems if you move it a bit between each click, that will reduce the chances of it thinking you want to zoom, or adjust the view.  Occasionally I have seen it spin me 90-180 degrees off from where I was headed, so keep half an eye on your general heading in case that happens.

I find it rather interesting, after writing the game, that it's still fun to play.

At some point I may try to increase the chances of hitting urban/suburban areas.  Right now the valid random places are based on about 8 circles of varying sizes: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, continental US/Canada/Mexico, Alaska/NW Canada, Hawaii, Europe, Japan, and Brazil.  Each has a probability, initially based on area size, but also hand-jiggered a tiny bit based on how much empty expanse it has.  I should tweak them more to have a stronger bias toward Europe, Japan, and such places that have less empty space.  I could specify urban areas (e.g. the US coasts) and give them a bit more probability of being selected.  Other places that should be added: Moscow, Israel, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore.

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