ZoomOut

This is great! I'm really surprised how I managed to do so many without failing. The game itself is well built and does the job without problems, but the real 'craft' here is the careful selection of the images and the various zoom levels, which I think you've done a great job with. I can see lazy or poorly chosen user submitted screenshots and zooms being a problem, but the material that's here is great!

To improve the experience, I'd suggest choosing a more thematic name related to the subject matter, and maybe add some kind of mascot or host character to make it seem slightly more like a gameshow? Maybe some cool css animations for a successful guess, confetti falling down the screen, make winning an 'event'?

Great stuff

Really awesome Idea, personally I kept narrowing it down to the franchise, but getting stuck on which of the 50 games in the list it was, The hint of when it was made definitely helps though, and theres room for detective work like using the graphics to guess what console/ time period the game was released on. The Interface is pretty good, though when I was in that loop of guessing games from franchises, I'd prefer if it kept the list from the search instead of it changing your search to the selected game, as if it's wrong you'll now inevitably have to erase the pasted in words. The only other thing I'd say is it'd be nice to have a "Sort List By Release Year" Option, since if you're told it was released after 2016 say, you don't really want to look through dozens of games in the list from the 90s and early 2000s that can't be what you're looking for.

I definitely think there may be ways to make the UI be responsive to the player already knowing the date range and possibly words in the title, maybe moving less likely guesses to the bottom of the list, or highlighting words and dates in the list that match. So If the Player is looking for a Mario Game that came out after 2013, and searches "Mario", the dozens of mario games before then could be greyed out at the bottom of the list (Still guessable in case the player wants to get information from guessing the title, like "Does it have Super in the Name", but greyed out to draw attention to actual possible guesses).

The first impression I get from this game is that I don't know my games well enough. I didn't score very highly 😅

Even then, though, I enjoyed discovering the games bit-by-bit, and it really does force you to appreciate their artwork. It's well-polished, and it remembering your previous plays is a nice touch. I love the "Did you know…?" sections, and it has a level creator?! Clearly quite a bit of thought went into this :)

It might be nice if players could filter the games by a theme (or, say, if each week had a specific theme), as I expect a lot of people won't have played everything but will have played most games from a particular genre. I'm also wondering if a timer would inject a sense of urgency 🤔

Fantastic :)

Played it earlier when you posted it to Discord and I think I already gave you some feedback. But lets get to more details now that you've submitted it to deeper scrutiny. 😅

Kinda toughies on the most recents…

Or with spoilers…

Those hints can be a bit too much sometimes. Same thing happened to me on the warcraft 3 one too.

Very nice that you can pretty much just play with keyboard but going to previous day would be nice too (I don't count shift+tabbing to it). Also would be nice to navigate the list around so you could more quickly jump to the last suggestion. It's very good at finding what you're typing though. Awesome quality of life to allow 2 -> II etc etc.

It could scale a bit better. With my current browser window size, it just awkwardly doesn't fit without scrolling when there are more than few guesses. Of course it's nothing major but as always, there is room for improvement.

I think it would need bit more competitiveness and stats and so on to keep players coming back daily. And right now it's very little to do per day. Of course you could come back like once per week so there is more to play but then you run the risk of forgetting the game completely. I think having something like 5 daily puzzles would be the sweet spot but would needing that much content per day be an issue?

But of course making it more competitive would also introduce some issues with cheating. It would be rather easy to figure out the answer on incognito and then answer on your main. Or even just grab the full pic from dev tools as the picture seems to be just css cropped. Well, don't know why anyone would bother but if there was leaderboards, surely some people will.

@voxel @aaronbacon @toasty @anttihaavikko Thanks to each of you for the quality feedback! All good suggestions, some of them are in the roadmap, and Aaron's request to sort games by year has actually made its way to the site already - we're experimenting it as the new default behavior.

In terms of contents, something I'd like to do eventually would be a multiplayer mode that is run a bit like those online pictonary games: you create a room, share a link with your friends to fill your lobby, then start guessing games from random screenshots that slowly zoom out, and battle for high scores. That would then open the way to custom lobbies that restrict games by genre, license, era or console etc. So lots of potential for fun stuff I think, but also quite some work to do!

(And Voxel make sure not to miss the October 6 level *wink*)