I built the first version of Capital Punishment in a hotel room on a family trip to China. I had a laptop, intermittent wifi, and the kind of late nights you get when you're twelve hours off your normal schedule and not quite tired enough to sleep. The game was inspired by Trivia Murder Party. I wanted something in that genre I could put on the web.
Geography made sense. The mechanic is simple: you see a country on a map and name its capital. You either know it or you don't. The name of the game is a joke about what happens when you get one wrong.
The playtester problem
I have a friend named Eric who is genuinely obsessed with geography. He knows the capital of Kyrgyzstan without having to think about it. He was the obvious playtester, except I was in China and he was back home, which meant a twelve-hour gap on every build I sent him.
I would finish a version late at night, send it over, and wake up to notes. It was actually a decent way to work. The gap forced me to commit to a build before sending rather than tinkering forever, and Eric's feedback was specific. He had opinions on which countries were too easy and which were unfair. He also caught data problems. The kind of thing only a geography obsessive would flag. South Africa has three capitals. The game had one.
He also had a higher score than me from the first build he tested. He still does.
The Canada problem
The map is SVG-based, which sounds like a solved problem until you start working with it. Most countries are fine. Canada is not fine.
Canada has a lot of islands. The northern coastline is basically a fractal. SVG paths for countries like Canada include every territory, every archipelago, every jagged chunk of coastline that is technically part of the country. Visually this is accurate. Practically it means the shape you are rendering is enormous and irregular in ways that look bad at any zoom level where smaller countries are also visible.
Several other countries had the same problem: overseas territories that bloat the bounding box, island chains invisible at the map zoom level, coastlines that make the path data huge for no visual payoff. Every fix was manual. Simplify the path, check how it renders, simplify again. Canada needed the most passes.
What shipped
The final version covers every sovereign nation with a recognized capital. Streaks are rewarded. There's a timer. The map zooms to keep the active country visible, which Eric asked for after pointing out that some of the smaller nations were essentially invisible at the default zoom level and that finding them wasn't really a test of geography knowledge.
It's probably the most replayable game on the site if you care about geography. If you don't, it's a fast reminder of how many capitals you've forgotten since school. Either way, Eric will score higher than you.