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Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

(www.eggnog.ai)
497 points samplank2 | 7 comments | 12 Mar 25 20:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.651s | source | bottom

Hi HN! I love imagining the past, so I made Time Portal, a game where you are dropped into a historical event and see AI video footage from that moment. You have to guess where you are in time and on the map. It’s like GeoGuessr (and heavily inspired by it!) but for historical events.

The videos are all created with AI. It’s a pipeline of Flux (images), Kling (video), and mmaudio (audio). The videos aren’t always historically accurate to the last detail. They might incorporate elements of folklore or have details from popular beliefs about the way things looked rather than the latest academic research on how they looked.

I’m thinking a lot about how to make the game more interactive. One thing that makes Geoguessr so fun for me is that you can move infinitely and always find more details to help you pinpoint the location. I want Time Portal to have a similar quality. I have a few ideas to try soon that will hopefully make the game more interactive and infinite.

1. stingrae ◴[12 Mar 25 21:20 UTC] No.43347793[source]▶
My first reaction is that the scoring is too harsh. I got within 50 years and 100 km and the resulting score is 7,406 / 10,000.
replies(2): >>43347832 #>>43347993 #
2. samplank2 ◴[12 Mar 25 21:27 UTC] No.43347832[source]▶
Yeah the scoring can be pretty harsh. You should be able to see your percentile overall and for each round on the results page.
replies(1): >>43353443 #
3. maratc ◴[12 Mar 25 21:47 UTC] No.43347993[source]▶
I got within 15 years and 200 km but got 7,275 / 10,000. If the expectation is to absolutely nail it, I can hardly imagine who is it for.
replies(1): >>43348259 #
4. samplank2 ◴[12 Mar 25 22:19 UTC] No.43348259[source]▶
My hope is that one day there is a Rainbolt for Time Portal. For someone like that to exist, the game has to be hard. That said, I agree the scoring could definitely use some improvement!
replies(1): >>43351478 #
5. maratc ◴[13 Mar 25 09:06 UTC] No.43351478{3}[source]▶
I've put the part about Pope Gregory (and St Paul Basilica) at the St Paul basilica in Vatican. Was punished by not putting it in Rome (where by "Rome" the game probably meant "whatever the meaning is in the underlying map engine").

The Alaska sale is in DC? One of the videos has the exchange of the flags on the post.

6. Miraltar ◴[13 Mar 25 14:00 UTC] No.43353443[source]▶
I really think that the scoring is fine, I like to have a big progression margin but I think it would be nice to know how the score is computed.
replies(1): >>43355257 #
7. samplank2 ◴[13 Mar 25 17:07 UTC] No.43355257{3}[source]▶
Good call. I should make the scoring more transparent.