The Elusive Photo Hunt App

Photo Hunt. Picture Hunt. Find 7. Spot the Differences. Whatever it's called, it's a game in which you are presented two seemingly identical pictures and the goal is to find x number of differences between them. As a child, I played them occasionally in the newspapers. For a while, Parade Magazine, or whatever it was that came with the Sunday edition of NY Daily News, had them and I often played them with my nieces. I even got one niece two such books from Border's.

After getting to know ViquaGames.com's HideNSeek and Mahjong Towers Eternity, I set out on a quest to find a web site that would enable the creation of games using one's own photos. HideNSeek is a great game of the I Spy genre, even if you are stuck with canned objects. Mahjong Towers Eternity allows custom tileset using one's own photos. It would be nice if the game can be played as a Flash game and shareable on blogs, but it's good enough for now. Surely there must be a site where you can upload a photo, edit it and make it different in x places, then save it as a copy. Lastly, the game would be playable online.

It's been a disappointment quest. While there are many sites where you get to play the game online, for free, there is no place where you can upload your own photo and make a game out of it. If ViquaGames allows the use of one's own photos as background and quarantine the new puzzles a few hours to filter out any inappropriate content, surely there must be other web sites that can allow the creation of these find-the-differences games. There was this Windows app Photo Hunt Designer but even with that you can only upload your creations for others to download, not something to play right on the web. I can definitely made a non-interactive game - the player would just have to eyeball the picture and note on paper the differences, no clicking and seeing the differences highlighted. However, a visit to AllStarPuzzles ( http://www.allstarpuzzles.com/spotdiff/ ) gave me an idea. The spot-differences game there are not Flash and are probably JavaScript, something that I think I can manage. I've always wanted to learn a little more JavaScript anyway, having a goal in mind is helpful.

Flashbang

One interesting thing I learned on vacation was the effect camera flash has on shooting arcade. By shooting arcade I mean those amusement park attractions where you shoot at targets to make things move. Piano player hits a few notes, skulls snap backward, bottles do somersault, and so on. I had my share of losing a dollar or so and could not make anything move. Later on, my big group descended upon the shooting gallery so I thought I should take a few pictures of the group members with their rifles. As the flash briefly brightened the gallery, many of the nearby objects went nut! I never knew what normally makes the objects move as there was no actual bullets flying out of the rifle muzzle, but a simple digital camera flash sure did the job.

It was closing time and there was no amusement park attendants nearby to tell me to quit it so I flashed the scene a few more times, much to the amusement of the group. Too bad there was no prize involved otherwise I could have won one of those large stuffed animals.