

Show HN: A Facebook profile picture guessing game I made - Skywing

Over the past few days, I've been working on this fun idea I had when I first saw the blur.js post, here on HN. My first though was to make a game using it. So, I wrote Friendblur.<p>Check it out: http://friendblur.com/<p>This was my first Backbone.js app, as well. It seems to work pretty good on IE, FF, Chrome and Safari. I used Bootstrap to quickly get it out there. There's no server side database or anything, yet. I don't keep track of scores or anything. The only thing the server does is pipe facebook image data back to the user, because that was the first idea I had as to how to get around a cross-domain issue with blur.js.<p>So, if anyone knows how to get image data somehow from the browser cache or something, that'd save me some bandwidth. :)
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nedwin
Nice work, it's an interesting mechanic.

You might want to look at some kind of scoring system + sharing of that score
to increase sharing of the application.

ie "I guessed 10/20 of my friends profile pictures".

This would allow you to use it as a competition entry mechanic for brand
promotions. We do this kind of thing all the time:
<http://nativedigital.com.au/social>

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Skywing
Thanks for the feedback. That's kind of my goal for tonight. I'm going to keep
track of the total number of rounds that each person has guessed correctly, I
think. Something along those lines. I think this would maybe prompt people to
want to have a lot of successful rounds, which means played a lot of rounds.

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nedwin
Nice. And then maybe high scores and leaderboards?

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Skywing
Yea. I've got it logging when a person wins a round, now. I was thinking
though, maybe I should only log consecutive wins, otherwise it'd just be the
person who plays the most. Consecutive wins might keep the leader board empty,
though. :P

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nycreating
Nice work. Think it would be fun to have just one image..and the player gets
quick feedback on whether their guess is correct or not. Then, quickly goes to
the next pic. Just a thought.

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Skywing
This is how the app idea started, actually. When I showed it to some friends
and watched them play, there just wasn't enough sense of a game mechanic, I
guess. When I showed my dad, who is not the most technical guy, he saw the
timer and felt rushed to guess before it was up. That's when I realized that I
should make it more of a per-round type thing, and the goal is to get all 3
correct. It just felt more natural, I guess.

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vineet
Fun. I would love a pause button, so that I can take a break - or look up the
person's profile that it just showed me.

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Skywing
It does pause if you win the round. I could easily add a pause button, though.
You also give me a good idea - I should make the names at the end of the round
be links to their profile, too.

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vineet
A 10 second pause at the end of the round is not enough for me to get a drink
of water. A button would have helped me.

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Skywing
I mean, if you guess all three of the friends in the set, it stops the timer
all-together. I will add similar logic to a button, as well.

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Skywing
Clickable URL: <http://friendblur.com/>

