Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass

https://geo-racers.com/

by pattle • 5 months ago

152 89 5 months ago

geo-racers.com

fatcow• 5 months ago

What an incredible idea! Love it, will spend some monopoly money on it!!

b112• 5 months ago

The login screen overflows my screen, and it won't pinch zoom smaller.

baq2• 5 months ago

Huge login form for a landing page without as much of a video of what's going on is a shot in the foot

jen729w2• 5 months ago

There's a 'continue as guest' option at the bottom of that form. But yeah that was also my immediate impression.

pattle8• 5 months ago

You can just enter any name to play as a guest

jen729w2• 5 months ago

I love the idea, but the whole interface is very twitchy for me. Tried Safari & Firefox on my MacBook Air M1.

Titan2189• 5 months ago

It's like JetLag the Game, but without ever leaving your house!

gcanyon• 5 months ago

I highlighted a train station, clicked "walk here," and nothing happened. I sped up time and I did not move.

I gave up.

Also, an introduction explaining what the game is would be good rather than just asking for a player name and dropping the user into the game.

pattle8• 5 months ago

Hello I'm Chris the creator!

For the past year I've been working on Geo Racers, a free to play web game where you have to race from one side of the world to another just using public transport. It's inspired by the BBC show "Race across the world".

It's early stages but any feedback on the game it's greatly recieved.

maeln• 5 months ago

I had a lot of fun :) . Cleaning up the leader board would be appreciated though. Seeing adolf hilter everywhere is ... something.

There also seem to be a bug where the game doesn't always spawn you where it should. Selected Galeway to Roma and was put in scotland with only euros and no banks around. Probably how some people manage to get was seems to be impossible score

rathboma3• 5 months ago

So cool! Couple of minor bugs - I can click banks / hotels and use them without being near them, also many hotels in ex Paris do not show up as usable, neither does the Paris metro. Still, super fun to play.

rathboma3• 5 months ago

Some other features I'd love to see: - Ability to check transit timetables without going there - Metros / Tubes / Subways for in-city transit

Hit a wall going to Plymouth when I should have gone to Portsmouth, but had no way to check which one had the ferry I needed.

JKCalhoun2• 5 months ago

My wife thinks it looks like stress.

– Checking/unchecking some items does not appear to toggle their visibility. (Safari, MacOS).

— As another pointed out, walked to a hotel, could not enter hotel (too far off road?).

JKCalhoun2• 5 months ago

I do wish I could do some in-game research—like show just train/bus stations that have international lines. Perhaps identify hotels with general affordability (€, vs. €€€).

xd1936• 5 months ago

This rules! What a fun idea.

I couldn't get the "Walk Here"/"Taxi Here" tooltip pop-up to stay open on Firefox when clicking on a train station, but it's working in Chrome.

pattle8• 5 months ago

Sorry about that. Should be fixed now

wazoox3• 5 months ago

Too bad apparently you can't ride bus and metro in London, Paris, etc.

butlike4• 5 months ago

Really like the game so far. Here's what I noticed and what I'd like to see after my first play though:

1. There should be an 'easy mode' where your money goes into the red, but you're still allowed to spend whatever to get to the end. It would be nice to see I'm $-14,952 in the hole, but I made it (with the ultimate objective to get to the destination while in the black).

2. The bottom overlays overlap. I was taking a ferry from Dublin, and tried to queue up walking to the hotel. The hotel overlay popped up under the "Skip this Ride" message. I don't really care if I can queue up actions, but the stacked overlays were unsightly.

3. I would say LEAVE THE SURPRISES. It was enjoyable to get blind-sighted by having to change my currency in the UK and the fact I lost an hour due to time zone changes.

Good work. Keep it up.

Nextgrid• 5 months ago

I think the "limited budget" mechanic should be scrapped - instead make the budget unlimited but rank the submissions based on the lowest budget.

vessenes• 5 months ago

Well, my run-through had no banks in the UK that I could find, so that was tough.

pattle8• 5 months ago

I think an easy mode is a good idea, I will explore that. I'm glad you like the surprises, I do think they add another layer to the game and makes it more stategic.

gallamine• 5 months ago

Hi! I got stuck in London. I walked around to a bunch of train stations at around 10PM on Monday night and there was nothing showing up in the timetables. Same for the next morning. I then walked to Portsmouth and the Portsmouth harbor also showed no boats. The API call was https://geo-racers.com/api/boats?from_id=43128&time=07:02&da... seems odd to me?

4ndrewl2• 5 months ago

I love this, but I'm thwarted. Apparently there are no trains from London Waterloo (one of the UKs busiest railway stations) at 1902. I've been stuck there waiting for trains for so many years I can tell you that's not the case :)

thinkingemote• 5 months ago

there were no trains from Waterloo at 19.02 because of a "major disruption" https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2170277/waterloo-trains-li...

Asooka• 5 months ago

No hotel accepts cash nowadays, there is absolutely no need to exchange currency basically ever. I would remove that part of the game.

canpan• 5 months ago

Would love to be able to change to a transit map. The map display is in "car mode", which makes it hard to use. There is no rail diaplay at all. In apple and google maps I normally use the transit mode.

Worried it gives the wrong impression that using trains is hard, when it's super easy in real life. I am actually sitting in a train right now.

Or if you want to double down on making it harder, you could use a satellite image view.

aranw• 5 months ago

Was on an overnight bus and ended with game over

PokemonNoGo2• 5 months ago

Yeah i was an hour from boarding my overnight bus and it seems i got game over for not being at a hotel.

There are just 2 rules 1. You can't fly 2. You must be in a hotel by 2am unless you have overnight transport

Guess the "have" doesn't work as i thought.

Karliss3• 5 months ago

Similar thing here. Was in a ferry from Ireland to France and got a penalty for not being in a hotel. How is 20 hour ferry not considered an overnight transport.

szemy2• 5 months ago

When I select a destination at a bus stop or train station the listings only show the specifics but not the city itself. This kind of defeats the whole purpose as its essentially randomly clicking around

xyzelement2• 5 months ago

Really conveys the stress and horror of traveling by public transit.

PokemonNoGo2• 5 months ago

Its all the same to me. An airport is probably the last place i want to be at and driving in a foreign country is something i find more stressfull than utilising the public transport there.

xyzelement2• 5 months ago

It's the 5000 transfers that I am talking about.

walthamstow• 5 months ago

Transcontinental road/rail/sea transport would probably be a lot better if the airplane didn't exist

butlike4• 5 months ago

I think it's kind of fun. It's the sport of it, good chap. I mean, the 1000's of transfers mate.

baq2• 5 months ago

The game has increased my appreciation of the airplane as a mode of transport, unfortunately

butlike4• 5 months ago

I'm surprised how walkable Galway is, tbh

virtualritz• 5 months ago

I started Galeway-Rome but when I toogle Bus Stations they don't disappear.

They do disappear together with with the toggle for train station. I.e. I can't view train stations only.

level87• 5 months ago

Love the idea!

aoeCoder• 5 months ago

I love the game thus far! I will say it is difficult to find work. I nearly went bankrupt cause I travelled to a large city thinking I could find work, but it didn't pay enough for a hotel room. Knowing how much it costs to get to a city via train/bus/taxi would help a lot.

vvarp• 5 months ago

idea is absolutely lovely, but it is really hard to plan ahead without consulting with google maps about possible directions from your next stop - I understand this is part of the challenge, however some QoL changes like visualizing 1st or 2nd tier connections could be super helpful

I'll be keeping an eye on this one!

Karliss3• 5 months ago

Bought a ferry ticket, it told me I am close enough to board. The usual popup for advancing time to leaving time didn't show up. Decided to speed up time and wait it manually it just kept going without getting in until 2am when out of hotel triggered game over.

pattle8• 5 months ago

Hmm, that's not good. Where was the ferry from and to?

Karliss3• 5 months ago

One of the 2 terminals in Cherbourg France, the city you reach by traveling from Dublin to France, but not the one I arrived in. It only had routes to England.

wazoox3• 5 months ago

Nitpicks :

* If there's a time limit, there's no way to know. I'm currently on my 3rd day travelling :) * I was waiting for my bus and I had forgotten the exact time. There is no way to know until it starts :) * While riding the bus I can't seem to be able to push speed over 100x. A Paris-Barcelona bus ride is long, even at 100x :) Later on a second bus, I could. Weird... * You should explain that "banks", "bus stations" etc are special game icons, not actual banks and bus stops on the map :) I was in Paris trying to change money in the "money exchange" at Gare du Nord, and I tried a while to do something until I understood that you can only use the special "Bank" icons. * In Almeria, the busses look like the regular city network. I tried taking one, but the game is now frozen... It's time for my bus, but nothing happens.

tekkk2• 5 months ago

Just remove the work part man. It's incredibly frustrating when you run out of money. Add some credit card loan or something and your final score is the amount of money you have left. Also, add teleport button—I clicked the big red button thinking it would transport me instantly. Only to be dropped off to in the middle of nowhere. And when you select a departure from train station, it should auto-select the end-stop, so you don't have to scroll down and click it (which is non-obvious btw that you have to)

pattle8• 5 months ago

The reason you have to work is because the game is based on a BBC show called "Race across the world" where you have to race from point A to point B with the money equivalent of an air fare for the journey.

If you run out of money in the show or your funds are running low you can work to earn more money. So that's why I added that feature. I do think it adds a extra layer to the game as it's something you always have to think about

tekkk2• 5 months ago

It's good to follow an example but what works in a TV show can make for a bad game mechanic. Games like geo-guesser are nice because they focus on the fun part, figuring out locations. And leave the rest out. Learning real routes and prices is cool, playing fictional waiter is IMO not.

wazoox3• 5 months ago

So here I am, it's frozen there: https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/apps/files_s...

You can see several problems : I've deselected bus stations, boat stations, etc but they're still displayed. Time is frozen, my bus isn't coming, I'm stuck in Almeria, too bad !

Here's what's in the console:

    Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "geometry", xe is undefined
        lr App.vue:984
        callback App.vue:2183
        rr App.vue:894
    App.vue:984:25

Liftyee• 5 months ago

Neat game! I would like the map to have a scale bar though. It would also be useful to see train station timetables while somewhere else to plan ahead.

Floating points for currencies :/ "You only have 306.99999999999994 GBP, you can't exchange 307. "

janfoeh• 5 months ago

Just did Galway-Rome and enjoyed it! I'll check back in a while when you've had time to implement the minimap and tourist center, as you wrote elsewhere.

What was weird: Paris did not seem to have any public transport - I had to walk from one train station to another for 70 minutes, and the only bus I could find was an overland bus, not an inner city one.

Also, it's a bit unintuitive that the "Journey Details" at the end start at nine hours — to me, when I begin my journey at 9 'o clock, that is hour zero.

Stevvo• 5 months ago

Took a ferry to France, got a screen saying "Welcome to France", then it dumped me in the middle of the channel.

decimalenough• 5 months ago

How do I ride public transport on mobile? I've managed to get the timetable to pop up a few times by clicking around randomly, but there's no obvious button or action for this. I take it you have to actually be at the station to be able to see them?

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

This is fantastic fun. Cheers!

monlockandkey• 5 months ago

Nice job! It would be helpful when using public transportation to see the names of places overlaid on the map.

wackget• 5 months ago

A few feedback bits:

* At Dublin ferry port, only port 5 was clickable. * Card payments should be an option. Nobody would use cash like this. * Banks aren't open at 10PM. In fact, banks are hardly open at all. * You can change money at a Post Office or supermarket.

jamses• 5 months ago

This was great fun. The race to Rome says it's to the colosseum, but it's actually pointing to a roundabout near Termini station :)

How on earth are people managing in 5 hours though? I had £95 left after a bus, ferry, train, and bus, taking me to 2.5 days; the ferry alone took nearly a day.

daveys110• 5 months ago

Love this! Got stuck at Gare du Nord in Paris though. Despite being Europe’s busiest train station, no tickets going towards the South, only North. Seems suspicious! What’s the ticket logic? Is it founded on reality? Or just totally faked?

cornichon622• 5 months ago

Hi, yes the Gare du Nord (ie North Train Station) mainly has trains going to the north. For the south, you'd have to go to the Gare de Lyon, Lyon being a city in southern France :)

netsharc2• 5 months ago

In Moscow there's the Kazansky, Yaroslavsky and Leningradsky stations. They're next to each other but serve lines going to different cities.

pattle8• 5 months ago

I think that's correct. Gare du Nord only serves stations north of it. You want to go to one of the stations in the south

seabass-labrax2• 5 months ago

Indeed. It's an absolute pain in real life trying to go south to Gare Montparnasse when you've just arrived at Gare du Nord - your options are: to walk, which takes forever; to take a bus, which is still rather slow and awkward with luggage; or to take the Metro, which is only a bit faster and even more awkward with luggage - there aren't any lifts at the Montparnasse Metro station!

ls65536• 5 months ago

This is really fun!

A possible bug though: I managed to finish Inverness to Gibraltar, and the top three spots on the leaderboard somehow had negative time durations!

PonyoSunshine• 5 months ago

I managed to make it through most of the UK, but I ran into an issue in Portsmouth. On the map, it appeared there were a whole bunch of shipping lane options, but when I tried both, one only had two cryptic options, and the other had none. Possibly, it would also be nice to have some sort of toggable pda that had an itinerary of all the tickets you have purchased, but haven't used yet.

pimlottc• 5 months ago

Please respect the silence setting on mobile, thanks!

thehodge• 5 months ago

and desktop!

seabass-labrax2• 5 months ago

It's a really fun game! One frustration - and probably a realistic one - is that there aren't nearly enough jobs and they don't pay well enough to break even with the hotel costs.

seanhly• 5 months ago

Great work! This is seriously addictive. I did some QA for you (after playing the game for more hours than I'd like to admit):

- Bristol Airport (bus station) is somehow located in Milan. This makes it possible to get a £6 ticket to the stop after Bristol Airport on the Bristol-Plymouth route. Then when you see the bus glitching its way towards Milan you can cut the journey short before passing Bristol Airport, and hey presto you're in Milan. Likewise, it's possible to get buses from this weird station in Milan directly to England, which is a bug.

- You make things easier for cheaters by printing the game start params to the console when users select one of the two/three starting options. Cheaters can just store the printed variable as a global var, set the end coordinates to be directly next to the finish line, and win the game in seconds. It would be best to introduce some basic cheat-detection: overall duration too short, velocity too high, too little money spent, etc. Best solution would be to do more things on the backend like logging game start and end times.

- Users are able to click on any bank to change currency, even if it's on another continent. Even if this is blocked on the UI, it can still be done in DEV tools.

- Likewise, players are able to use hotels anywhere, not just hotels in their vicinity.

- It seems you switch the currency for taxis only when the country officially changes. So, when there are glitches with this territorial transition sometimes the currency doesn't change. E.g. when I got a bus to Milan's "Bristol Airport" stop (from Bristol, England) I was then able to book taxis in GBP regardless of being in Europe.

- When you change timezones, fast-forwarding to your next departure can sometimes cause the game clock to go backwards by up to 1 hour. I was able to use this glitch to scrape an hour off my time at each stop on the continent.

- I noticed some people using nicknames like AdolfHitler in the leaderboard. I would consider running usernames through a character-level sentence transformer to calculate similarity to some banned usernames (there might even be a pre-trained transformer for offensive language, allowing you to classify usernames as allowed/offensive). The username field could otherwise become a shitshow of abuse and advertising spam if there are no restrictions placed here.

- Banks should close after 5pm and open at 9am.

- Seeing as most of the routes start on the island of Ireland, I'd recommend adding Cork ferry port (Ringaskiddy). It's a major connection to France and has some seasonal ferries to Spain also.

- Maybe remove the icon for tram stations until that functionality is available.

- Might be nice to allow players to see the timetable for other stations along their current route. I get that making all timetables visible might ruin the fun, but it's possible to hop off early at the next station anyway if you're quick enough to click into the station while approaching, pause the game, read the timetables, and hop off if appropriate. This style of play would definitely require some dev tools usage so might as well democratise access to timetables to all players.

- When a player begins to move along the route, I think it would be nice if the game speed accelerated proportionally to the length of the route. Going from 1x speed to 100x speed for a walking route is often instant for example, which removes the opportunity for players to use that walking time to think of their next move.

- Some train routes have strange, unrealistic detours, like the train from Edinburgh to Plymouth, it randomly turns east for a 100 miles near Leads before going back towards Leeds to resume its journey along the original direction. You could potentially detect these jagged turns in your route files automatically using some maths.

- Might be nice to integrate sailrail tickets. These allow travellers to go from any station in Ireland to any station in the UK for under 70 EUR usually.

- There's a great app called OSMAnd which provides offline public transport routes and direction routing for the entire globe. Although the app costs money I believe all the code is open source and I presume the data is publically accessible. You could potentially use this data to flesh out the routes and timetables in your game, and to make the contours between points on the route realistic as opposed to the current zig zag lines.

Again, great work!

reedlaw• 5 months ago

Great feedback. On the Inverness to Gibraltar race the leaderboard has impossible times, including some negative numbers. According to Google Maps the best time is 1 day 8 hours, but this requires leaving Inverness at 6:44. The race starts at 9:00. Then the earliest arrival time in Paris is 22:19. According to Google Maps the best time from Paris to Gibraltar at this time of night is 1 day 2 hours. Despite all this, there are several 1 day records. The best I can do is 2 days 5 hours. Of course I may be missing some better route, but I suspect cheating, especially from names like AdolfHitler.

nathancahill• 5 months ago

Partner with Rome2Rio for in-game research module.

stevage2• 5 months ago

This is amazing. Super challenging.

Two UX feedbacks:

- it took me a long time to work out how to buy a ticket. It doesn't really make sense that you can't click on the coach icon, you have to click the circle around the coach icon.

- I mistakenly clicked "get off at the next stop". (I interpreted it as "jump forward to arriving at your destination). It really needs a confirmation - I wasted a huge amount of money.

zan• 5 months ago

I spent way too much time on this yesterday! Love it but it's super tricky. I'd love a (realistic) "cheat" that lets me see the departure boards without being at the station - that way you can plan the journey at least a little upfront. I'd do that on my phone anyway

elfly• 5 months ago

Great job!

A problem I found was that getting at a local bus station at London, showed all their destinations as London, but without any precise place of where I would arrive. At one point I traveled from one part of London, to Bash, a completely different city, back to another part of London.

parkersweb2• 5 months ago

Love this! One piece of UI feedback - on mobile particularly I often found it very difficult to access the departure timetable once I'd arrived at a station. I walked to Bercy Seine in Paris (so I could try and find a bus out) - but even when I had arrived I couldn't trigger the departure timetable....

d-lowl• 5 months ago

Really fun.

Some timetables are very wrong unfortunately. e.g. there was no ferry from Plymouth to Santander at all (which I relied on). It'd be good to be able to see the timetables before I get to the station (otherwise, it's hard to plan)

scrumper• 5 months ago

Fun, if buggy. There's a real-world version of it as a British reality TV show, it's entertaining.

I crapped out in my first play: I boarded a bus in London taking me to Dover, it went to Folkestone then travelled at warp speed to Doncaster which is more or less the opposite end of the country.

The lack of information about routes from your destination adds a nice bit of randomness and luck. Quite liked that part.

EDIT: I'll definitely play again, sorry if my tone sounded negative because it really wasn't supposed to.

martimchaves• 5 months ago

Very fun game, thanks. When you try to change the speed of the game on mobile using firefox, it glitches and keeps opening the speed modal. Pretty much crashes the browser. Also +1 to the taxi fare not being paid in the currency of the country, but in some other currency. More jobs would be great! Appreciate the difficulty of not knowing exactly where you'll be taken, but without consistent jobs sometimes it's really punishing (or at least feels really punishing). I was thinking it might be cool to add stamina, and fancier hotels may replenish more stamina. An incentive to splurge ah.

PaulRobinson• 5 months ago

A great idea with quite a few bugs. I would suggest watching people who have never played this game before try and play it and you'll notice a lot of things are going wrong that you've not seen before, and you're going to figure out how to make a lot of things a lot better. Really fun idea though, I'd love to try it again when it's less glitchy and the UX has had some work.

adriansabovici• 5 months ago

Having some issues at the Plymouth Bryttany Ferry terminal. I checked online and it runs every Wednesday and Sunday but on Wednesday there's no boat showing up. Really cool game though.

Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass

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