Here is a thing almost everyone is bad at: saying how big something is. Not comparing two objects side by side — that part is easy — but putting a number on a thing you can picture perfectly well. Just How Big? — Scale It is built entirely out of that gap.
What it is: estimate the real-world size of a thing, then find out how close you got. Who made it: Alex / Just How Big?. What it costs: nothing, and there is no account. Play Just How Big? — Scale It.
The developer has put two games on SlowDen's community shelf, and the pair is more interesting than either alone, because they test opposite halves of the same sense.
Just How Big? — Scale It asks for an absolute answer: how many metres, how many kilometres. You cannot hedge. Its own description covers objects, animals, structures and astronomical bodies, which is a deliberately brutal range — the same question asked about a housecat and about a star.
Just How Big? - Which is Bigger? removes the number entirely and asks only which of two things is larger. That sounds easier, and mostly it is, right up until the two things are far enough apart in kind that you have no shared reference — a vehicle against a landmark, a microscopic object against an animal.
We are describing the design, not reviewing it. SlowDen does not score games and counts no plays, so we have no basis for telling you either one is good — only for telling you what they are.
The phrase comes from the game's own description, and it is the right one. If you guess a blue whale at 8 metres when it is 25, you are wrong by a factor of three. If you guess Jupiter's diameter at 14,000 km when it is about 140,000, you are wrong by a factor of ten — but in plain subtraction that second error is sixteen thousand times larger.
Scoring by raw difference would make every astronomical question worth more than every animal question put together, and the game would stop being about your sense of scale and start being about whether you got the space ones. Scoring by ratio keeps a cat and a star worth the same.
That is a real design decision and it is the sort of thing that separates a made thing from a generated one.
Both are on the community shelf — 121 games now, all sent in by the people who made them, as opposed to the partner catalogue. We did not make them, fund them, commission them or endorse them. They are listed because someone submitted them and they work.
If you build browser games, that shelf is open: submit your own game. Earlier in this series we wrote about a daily puzzle built out of Euler diagrams, a drawing game judged by an AI, and a three-year ball python genetics demo.
Play them: Just How Big? — Scale It and Just How Big? - Which is Bigger?, both by Alex / Just How Big? — free, in your browser, no download and no account.
All 311 free browser games on SlowDen — no download, no sign-up.