the_shivers

Hey everyone. My previous daily game, enclose.horse, was a surprising success, so I figured I'd take a stab at making another.

Tower of Questions is a high-stakes daily trivia game. Seven multiple-choice questions, each harder than the last, and if you get one wrong, you die!

While there are other daily trivia games out there, I felt they were lacking in excitement; if I got a question wrong, my reaction was "so what?" I wanted to see if I could make a trivia game where a wrong answer was actually terrifying. The obvious way to do this is by making a wrong answer an instant loss. Of course, that’s a bit harsh: you might be great at trivia, but one question in your weakest category can end your run. My solution was to give players lifelin—I mean “relics.” Long story short, I ended up remaking Who Wants to Be A Millionaire from first principles. Although I think "daily Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" is actually a pretty compelling pitch!

I'm also rebelling against the daily game trend of "minimalist everything, rounded rectangles everywhere." Every game seems to want to be a Wordle clone, so I went in the complete opposite direction. I spent about 6 weeks making all the pixel art for this. While I have some regrets about it, I think the result looks pretty cool.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think! I would love any feedback, whether it be about performance, question difficulty, or anything else you might notice.

Thanks for the feedback! And there's now one-square-only fences you can turn on in the settings.

Thanks for the feedback!

I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.

Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.

I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.

Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.

So far, I haven't had the heart to deceive people with red cherrings. All levels with cherries use at least some of them in the solution.

I tried to match what Wordle does, so it should come out midnight in your local timezone.

All the daily levels are built by hand. I struggled to come up with a good random level generator. You can see my feeble attempts in the Edit page (via the hamburger menu) by giving the dice button a few sad clicks.

I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.

Just vanilla canvas + Typescript.

This is now implemented on daily levels! Click the link below your score after submission.

This article does such a bad job of criticizing an already-unpopular theory that I found myself defending it. "The evidence is clear," "studies have repeatedly shown," and "analysis showed," would be a lot more convincing if the evidence, studies, and analysis were actually explained. Not to mention that focusing on income inequality doesn't disprove the idea of "a rising tide lifts all ships." It's possible the absolute wealth and standard of living of the poorest might increase while inequality also increases.

Alas, it still fails at my favorite music theory question. I've yet to see a chatbot get this right, even though it isn't a trick question at all.

I ask:

"Consider a tenor ukulele in standard tuning. If we tune it down by a half step, how might we then finger a Gmaj7?"

It initially reasons correctly that this must be G-B-D-F# and it understands what the resulting strings will be tuned to if we drop them a half step. It just can't work out a valid fingering, and ends up getting confused and suggesting a nonsense chord.

But Epstein did in fact kill himself.

I am incredibly skeptical of the hypothesis that this might be a murder. Asking a few key questions makes it clear how dubious it is:

Most importantly, who's gun was it? If it was someone else's gun, sure, it's a murder, but I think we'll find that the gun was Barnett's. And if so, we have to ask, how did the murderer manage to kill Barnett with his own gun?

How did the killer get into the truck? We can assume the killer had to be in the truck, since the alternative (killing Barnett elsewhere and dragging the body through a Holiday Inn parking lot into the driver's seat) is absurd. Did they get lucky and try the door, finding it to be open? If so, wouldn't there be signs of a struggle when a stranger enters your vehicle? Or did they get in because they know Barnett, and he let them in (in which case, they won't have an alibi)?

Why commit a murder in a public location? I won't be surprised if the Holiday Inn parking lot was being surveilled.

The fact that the gun was found in his hand, and the timing of the murder, do seem like pretty big coincidences. But I think it's easier to chalk these up to coincidences than it is to answer the above questions. Additionally, per his Wikipedia page, he suffered from PTSD and anxiety attacks. These don't guarantee that he's suicidal, but it's not the picture of perfect mental health either.

I'm very interested if anyone thinks they have a good explanation of how this could have taken place as a murder.

Key part of the article: though this measure was passed by the council, the mayor promised to veto it.

Disappointing to see the various crow garbage vending machines not pan out. I wonder of it's actually impossible or if it's just been poorly executed.

Reminds me of Omphalos by Ted Chiang.

Weird that it doesn't even name the porn site in question.

Overall this seems like pearl clutching. It's just pixels and text. Perhaps the easily horrified should avoid trying to run porn websites.

Move fast and break things sounds the opposite of Orwellian.

I feel like this is exaggerating a bit. Spam exists, but the internet is still very usable. It could certainly become worse in the future, but I find it pretty easy to sift through content these days to get what I need.

Also, I don't think the problem is necessarily AI for some of these complaints. Twitter replies are awful because you can pay for increased visibility. On a platform like Reddit where its popularity that determines visibility, the issue virtually disappears. Same issue for SEO spam websites, it's a function of Google's algorithm which incentives brainless keyword spam rather than it being an AI issue. Both of these issues predate generative AI.

The braindead children's youtube videos, for what it's worth, also predate AI.

I feel like these are just growing pains from a revolutionary new technology. Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks.

This list is so ridiculous, it's not even worth responding point-by-point.

This was quite disappointing. It would be interesting to see what are actually the loudest cities (via measuring sound at various spots), but this doesn't do that. It doesn't even tell you if European or American cities are louder.

Maybe the rescuers should try texting.

You asked.

I feel like people are drawing the wrong conclusion from this.

LLMs aren't perfect, but I would vastly prefer to be assisted by an LLM over the braindead customer service chatbots we had before. The solution isn't "don't use LLMs for this," but instead "take what the LLMs say with a grain of salt."

Sounds like a win-win then.

You make a good case, but I cant help but wonder if the people who will die from lack of a transplant agree with UCSF's decision.

Why?

This is anecdata, so take it with a grain of salt, but I hear this isn't motivated by morals at all. Instead, people who spend on things like OnlyFans tend to later claim that those charges were fraudulent, expecting to get their money back. If true, it makes sense that Visa/Mastercard might ban this sort of stuff just to avoid the headache.

For what it's worth, I am having a blast with this. Great excuse to practice foreign accents. I'm American, so US is trivial, but it's rewarding to see your fake UK accent actually register as UK accent.

Still haven't managed Australian, but as a test, I shared the website with an Australian friend, and he showed me it is possible, and that this is just a "skill issue."