.Fun & Games Time
We’re making an iPhone game that will challenge players to correctly guess the breed of the dog photo they are shown. There will be all kinds of silly animations, sound effects, leaderboard stats, etc. One big hurdle we had though was that though we have millions of photos of purebred dogs, a percentage of them are actually photos of the owners, photo of their other pets, places they visited, etc. People can tag photos, but we still have hundreds of thousands of photos that aren’t good photos of the dog itself.
So we’ turned a problem into a huge fun experience for our website members. We made a simple web version of the game anyone can play, and if your are challenged with a photo that is blurry, shows a cat, shows a dogpile of dogs, you can click it as inappropriate. We store how many bad flags a photo gets, as well as how many times a photo is correctly guessed so we can learn the best and worst photos.
The best part is it’s been a ton of fun. Yesterday our average page-serves-per-visit increased 40% because the game is such a hit. We’ve been getting tons of great feedback which we hope will help make our the game we sell in the iPhone store a hit. We’re not planning on using similar game mechanics to qualify photos for other games such as ‘guess what breeds this mixed dog is’ or ‘what breed is this puppy’ or even other categories such as ‘cutest all time photos’ or ‘best representative photo of a breed.’ To make it fun for members we made a leaderboard and give away virtual currency when you get to new levels.
Check out the dog breed game and let us know what you think!
We made a cat breed game you can try too (warning, it’s hard!)
None of this is rocket science and admittedly we’ve got a long way to go to be a real game developer, but simplicity is proving itself to be a big hit already and though I wish we did this 3 years ago, better late than never.
Paws crossed we’ll translate this into a new revenue stream via the iPhone store and other app outlets!
If you have any thoughts on the game or advice on iPhone marketplace, please share.
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Played the game (cats). It was fun and it was educational–thanks. I have a few comments:
I found your “intermediate” level far more challenging than your “advanced” level (and not as worthwhile given the number of zealie points earned for each correct answer). I agonized far more at the intermediate level than I did at advanced.
If I’m not mistaken, there were far fewer breeds at the advanced level. The breeds also seemed to be easier to tell apart once correctly identified.
I also felt the game wasn’t as psychologically rewarding as it might have been, given that the same photo was used over and over. (There were also a few instances where I felt that a breed had been incorrectly identifed–I just learned what the photo looked like, rather than waste time with the “wrong” answer.)
Yes, I understand that you wanted me to spend as much time as possible on the site and didn’t allow multiple log ins–but it would have probably been more fun if I had just been able to play using my same log in and a couple of tabs in the browser window. (I probably would have played at intermediate level while I was waiting for uploads.) That would have been fair enough, wouldn’t it?
The game was addictive and I stuck around to earn the maximum number of zealie points and then some.
Thanks