Show HN: Trailmarks – Huge, browser-based, Carmen Sandiego-style travel game

[matsxmats]

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!

[wingerlang]

Nice, definitely gave backpacker vibes.

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?

[matsxmats]

Trying to make this genre come alive again with this! :)

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!

[wingerlang]

I took the initial "type" to be more of a difficulty or question-types, not about missions. Even so, clicking the bottom I get this:

> 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.

[matsxmats]

Ok, great to know. The achievement logic is half-baked because I don't really know if people would care or not. The way I'm reading you it sounds like you, at least, would like to see it more fleshed out. Which is cool, I got a ton of ideas for it!

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.

[wingerlang]

It's a view of cards, so I want to pull them left and right, I guess.

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.

[elijahwright]

This actually amused me for a few minutes - I played Carmen Sandiego last in the very early 90s and I got a nice nostalgia hit from this. OIDC logins and a backend where you can store progress and achievements would be a nice addition. Heck, even storing the data in my local browser’s store would be okay. :-)

[CactusOnFire]

This is fun, though I will note that when traveling, my new location didn't factor in, and all my locations were based on my initial locale.

Might be me being a firefox user.

Edit, tried in Chrome - still didn't work.

[matsxmats]

Oops, thanks for letting me know. Of course I had to introduce a bug when putting it live. It is fixed now, hope you'll enjoy a nice trail of pins across the planet ;)

[ArthurGallery]

How did you create the questions? I get that they are AI generated but how do you avoid halluciniations? They seem solid enough.

[matsxmats]

Thanks for asking! A few different things, and it's probably not perfect yet. But a few things:

+ 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.

[elijahwright]

(And now I’m off to search for Backpacker on board game geek…)