Show HN: We turned the Google Shopping API into a game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We turned the Google Shopping API into a game

cityposh.com

30 pointsnate15 comments

It's not perfect yet, but it is fun if you like price is right style games :) I'll probably be deploying a bug fix right after this comment, but thought you guys would dig seeing an alternative use of the Google Shopping API. Made by a few HNers. Hat tip to bcroesch for a lion's share of the work.

EDIT: Oh, you guys might dig this too. I would think there's some Sodoku fans on there. We made an image based Sodoku all in html/css/jquery. http://cityposh.com/contests/apple-tv-25-for-itunes/poshokus...

Loved it. Of course I'm biased since I'm in the 'gamification' space. I'm definitely horrible at this game, but every time I was about to quit I just had to click try again to prove that I could actually get one right.

I finally got up to about 800 points :)

Awesome thanks! Oh IActionable.com is very interesting. Gamifying Salesforce sounds like a great idea! I'll check this out too.

Could be fun, but needs titles of the products with the pictures or half the time you don't even know what you're looking at and touching "hint" goes to the website.

Right, understood. But that is also a big point of what we are doing with Cityposh. It's a promotional tool for businesses after all. So traffic back to their website is very much desired by companies who want to use Cityposh to promote them.

What can possibly be done is to open a in browser popup which shows the details of the product with an option of viewing them later. If i am playing the game with the intention of playing its not very likely that i would pause to buy before returning to the game. You can add whatever items were clicked for in a list below and when the game ends show the items that the player showed interest in.

Yeah, that's a very interesting idea. Thanks for that. We'll chew on something like that for sure.

Nice work. This taps straight into a game mechanic most people already have ingrained into them. Really addictive for a marketing game.

Two suggestions:

- Size up the images to be a greater percentage of the containing space. With a high resolution people are going to be squinting to figure out the products.

- After the user loses, show them what they got wrong - it's pretty unsatisfying not to see where you went wrong, and it's the behaviour people expect from the "price is right" mechanic. From your point of view, it's also an addition time to plug links.

Awesome suggestions. Thank you so much for these.

It's clever, and you can make at least as many variations on this as the Price is Right. Separate games for electronics, homewares, etc...

The ranking game is annoying me though. Some suggestions:

- if I fail to put them in the right order it should tell me how many are in the wrong position.

- if I ultimately fail after n tries it should reveal the prices. Right now I just sit there frustrated and unenlightened as to what I did wrong.

- audio cues for winning / losing. Really important for a game like this.

We hear you for sure on these points. Audio is the top of the priority list for polish we need to add to all of Cityposh. Thanks for checking it out, and helping us with this.

Sweet and addictive.

Complaint! When I click correctly on something, a red box shows up around the object for a second and then a little alert says "1 out of 2 tries" above the items. Below it tells me if I got it right.

This is confusing. The red box and the 1 out of 2 tries makes me think I picked wrong. But then the text below says I chose correctly. It's not immediately clear if I did well or not as I'm playing.

Agreed. I had the same kind of thing happen, and felt the same way. Thanks for bringing that up.

Nice creative idea here. I think its pretty fun.

A few things:

1. Sometimes I have no idea what an image is showing. Text would be really helpful.

2. What is the purpose of hints? I know people could just google search, but why make it so easy?

Thanks misuse! We are debating text over here. Text would make it easier to bot I think. Please don't bot this fellow HNers just because I mentioned this! :) Please! So a way to fix the bot problem here, is to force the optical character recognition to be the way to have to crack it. And Text descriptions would thwart that. So the purpose of hints is basically so you don't have to have text descriptions but still have a way of going over to the site to see prices. It's not perfect of course. Maybe the hint could be made a bit harder, like we send you to a search for "Macbook Pro" instead of the exact item. Thanks for the feedback on this and checking it out.

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