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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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)

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?

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.

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!

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!

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

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.

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

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!

Please respect the silence setting on mobile, thanks!

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. "

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

This is fantastic fun. Cheers!

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

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

Was on an overnight bus and ended with game over

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.

I loved the idea. Playing around

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

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.

Love the idea!

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