Show HN: Trailmarks – Huge, browser-based, Carmen Sandiego-style travel game
19 matsxmats 11 4/22/2025, 11:55:08 PM trailmarks.earth ↗
I'd love to have people test-play my Carmen Sandiego/Backpacker style travel game. It's a retro genre... but if you like geography and quizzes, you'll like this! It's a working alpha with most of the content I intend to add, but I need to have people give it a try now before I decide which directions to fully develop!
I'm torn between putting effort into missions, more advanced in-game trading economy or creating more of a narrative. But I'm also curious if you get the navigation, if the core gameplay makes sense and if you want to continue playing, basically.
Hope you find it worth playing. It's a pure browser game with no login, you're playing for free immediately in this alpha! Please feel welcome to DM feedback or reply or anything!
Some issues:
- It doesn't "feel" like a game, it felt a bit aimless. Maybe some missions like travel to X countries, do Y things, within Z starting budget. - The "X" at the top of the screen feels disjointed. - The popup covers the pin sometimes. - I wanted to click the departures to travel onwards. - Clicking the true/false feels odd, I was not sure whether I correctly guessed or not sometimes.
Is this genre alive at all nowadays?
Your feedback is noted! I have a mission system (bottom right corner), and indeed one thing I'm wondering is if I need to deck it out and make more of a fuss about it. I think you're right - it will help in making it a game. Thanks a lot for bringing it up. And thanks for the UI feedback too!
> The mission of your game. Complete all your levels and achievements, and you can return to London a success. Can you go to London yet? Nope!
Which is both confusing (I am in London) and aimless ("Do everything"). Definitely needs some more attention.
I also wish I could click-and-drag the cards, or simply click to focus, keeps tripping me up.
Why would you like to click-and-drag and focus on the cards? Where would you drag them? This is interesting, I haven't thought about this at all.
And.. well, I personally probably won't play it to be honest. Maybe if I had kids and the experience was a v1.0 instead of v0.2 I would be interested. Even then, it would be relying on my nostalgia around the Backpacker games. I'd definitely recommend getting feedback from people expressively interested in it.
Might be me being a firefox user.
Edit, tried in Chrome - still didn't work.
+ I've worked on a quiz app for a year so I have a bit of a polished prompt + writing good example questions + letting the AI choose the quiz topics + double checking with a different LLM. So GPT 4.5 reviewed questions from Claude and so on.
I think the percentage of hallucinations are at the same level as something written entirely by humans now.