Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'll be keeping an eye on this one!

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.

* 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.

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)

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

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

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.

- 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!