←back to thread

497 points samplank2 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

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. keyle ◴[] No.43348668[source]
This is cool, but I'm not sure some of the hints are not more red herrings than anything else. Because AI sort of blends things, the prompt needs to be spot on or, for example, India starts looking like any part of the middle east. Traditional China looks like Japan, etc.

Also some of the temporal clues were very good, some were 'wtf'.

I also laughed at some of the hallucination I witnessed. Like a group of people staring in a telescope pointing straight at a white wall.

Fun though, just needs to be honed in a little.

It would help to have markers on the timeline for the different ages, at least for the first round! e.g. Bronze age.

You already sort of do, being a Gregorian timeline and marking 0 AD as Christ's birth. That's a dead giveaway when you see crosses. So I think it would be fair and useful to give a range of eras as markers on the timeline.

The map could also be continental, and the locations more precise than the country.

The map could be more exciting, and change based on the timeline selection! It's currently showing the "current" map and not the map of the era; which in some respect is relevant.

Finally, the scoring could be more explanatory, you got 5,000 / 10,000 for the following reason / calculation method. Maybe a graph of points per time correction and location. It could also be more comprehensive scoring, with a slight multiplier for streaks, a badge for being good at temporal location vs. geolocation etc.

Scoring could animate up, to gamify the experience, create a sort of level end screen that builds up excitement. The map could animate and so could the timeline in this end phase.

I like the idea, there is a lot you could do to push this further.

replies(1): >>43348758 #
2. samplank2 ◴[] No.43348758[source]
Thanks for the feedback and the ideas! Is your idea about showing the ages just to make it a bit easier if you don't know exactly when different ages started and ended?
replies(1): >>43349435 #
3. keyle ◴[] No.43349435[source]
Yeah slightly easier and also educative if you think about it.

It also dresses up the timeline so that the game gets its own identity.