From barleycorn to bananas
Do you know how many bananas long is a city bus? Or maybe how many grasshoppers long is a soccer field? If you've played Daily Banana, you've probably froze as you try to a guess at least once.
Daily Banana (dailybanana.io) is a free daily guessing game from Smidgen Games where you estimate ridiculous measurements for everyday things. In it's first week Daily Banana has seen over 5,300 players join in the fun and played 7,300+ total games.
We sat down with Doug, the creator of Daily Banana and owner of Smidgen Games, to talk about where the idea came from, the versions that didn't make it, and where the game goes next.
It all started with a fun fact
Smidgen: Where did Daily Banana come from?
Doug: It started with my favorite fun fact: shoe sizes are based on barleycorns. Each shoe sizes in Europe/US go up by about a third of an inch, which is roughly the length of one barleycorn.
I can't remember exactly where I learned it. I think I was watching a YouTube video about old ways of measuring things and where they come from. That was about a year ago, and ever since then it's been my go-to fact at parties and work events.
Smidgen: So you're a trivia person?
Doug: Definitely. I've been doing trivia every week for almost 5 years now, and weird, fun trivia like this is exactly the kind of thing I enjoy. Shout out to Greg's Shitty Trivia Night!
Smidgen: How did a fun fact turn into a game?
Doug: For a long time I'd had an idea floating around inspired by the card game In a Pickle. I love that game. If you haven't played it, you play cards with things that could fit inside, or enclose, the previous item.
I love the idea, but games always seemed to end early for us, and it was never quite as silly as I wanted it to be. I figured there might be a way to push that idea further.
That got me thinking about other games built on silly comparisons, and how I could do something like that using the barleycorn idea. That's really where Daily Banana was born.
Smidgen: Smidgen is a tabletop publisher. Why make a daily web game?
Doug: I love board games because they bring people around the table and connect them. But really, I just love games in general.
What I love about daily games like Wordle is the shared community. Everybody on the planet is playing the exact same puzzle on the same day, and you're comparing your results with people all over the world. I just think that's really cool.
Smidgen: What did the first version look like?
Doug: It started as a simple Python script. I used to be a developer so I leaned on my Python experience to test a few options quickly and see if the game was even fun before building anything real.
Smidgen: You have a technical background too. How hard was this to build?
Doug: Before I became a product designer, I spent years as a backend developer, Python programmer, and adjunct professor for college level Python. Working on those products is actually what inspired me to start designing better ones than the ones I was building. Since then I've done front-end and website design, built design systems, plus digital and physical product design.
Honestly, Daily Banana isn't a hard app to make. At its core, it looks up two numbers, divides them and gives you a result. Its really a simple program that can be made in any 101 level programming course.
The hardest part was making sure all the server and backend functionality worked, and that took some trial and error. Back in the day, I would have written a bunch of scripts to scrape data from the web and clean it up before it went into the app (shout out to Automate the Boring Stuff with Python). Now tedious tasks like that can be handled pretty quickly with modern tools, automation, and IDEs.
The first versions were about fitting things inside other objects, or the reverse. Only a handful of people play tested it, mainly me and a close group of friends. We quickly realized it was not fun.
Smidgen: How many versions did it go through?
Doug: Quite a few. I tried re-creating classic board games like In a Pickle and Wits & Wagers, but nothing truly worked that well. They all needed large data sets of different measurement types, too much subjectivity in the game play, and I knew I wanted a game that was less serious and more fun.
Once I loosened the strings and focused on a simple dataset I could source online, plus silly measurements, the game kind of wrote itself. To be honest, the concept is nothing new. It's a different spin on games that already exist.
Smidgen: So how did it become Daily Banana?
Doug: Everyone's familiar with the "banana for scale" saying, so I leaned into that. After a bunch of iterations and a week of playtesting different ideas and concepts, I went back to the barleycorn fact. I thought, maybe I could make a game where people compare ridiculous measurements to everyday objects.
Smidgen: When did you know you had something?
Doug: Man. I was playtesting and guessed almost exactly how many grasshoppers long a soccer field is. The pure excitement of my guess being that close was the feeling I wanted to capture for everyone.
As a game designer, that's a key principle: make sure people are having fun, and capture the particular feeling a game can give you.
Smidgen: Was Daily Banana always the name?
Doug: Not at all. I went through a few different names, and some I liked more than others. I'm a product designer by trade and familiar with branding, so iterating, changing and making new designs is a process I know well.
I went as far as buying a few domains, then quickly realized I was having a hard time remembering the name of my own game. Anyone who knows anything about branding knows that being memorable and spreading by word of mouth are the most important things.
Smidgen: How did you land on the look?
Doug: My original idea was that you were typing into a terminal window on an old Mac, with scan lines, a green background and that warm feeling an old terminal gives you. I tested it for a bit, as you can see in some of the early screenshots, but it just didn't feel authentic. Maybe overused is the right word. I wanted something a little different and more modern.
So I went with a flatter approach and warmer colors: creamy whites and dark browns. The yellow really pops on the brown and makes a great banana accent.
For the logo, I tried a few ideas, like just using the banana emoji, or a monkey. In the end, I kept the pixel banana I made back when I was going for the terminal look. I actually think the contrast between the clean website and the pixelated banana is kind of cool. As a designer, I like that juxtaposition.
For type, I wanted something modern, legible, but also free. A Google Font is easy to use and loads on anyone's phone and computer, so again I was thinking about accessibility. The wordmark and logo icon are pretty standard and clean, which reflects the project.
Smidgen: What have players changed about the game since launch?
Doug: A lot, and that's the fun part. Here are a few changes that came straight from player feedback:
- The Golden Banana. Originally, players weren't rewarded for getting a perfect 100%. Now they earn a Golden Banana.
- More time. Players thought 20 seconds was too short, so I bumped it to 25.
- Shareable images. Players wanted to share an image on social media, not just a link.
- See how you stack up. Players wanted to know how they were doing against everyone else that day, so each question now shows a scale with your answer next to the day's average.
- Really, REALLY small and large sizes. I removed a bunch of very tiny objects, like grains of sand, and huge ones, like the Mariana Trench. They were way too difficult.
- Challenge codes. The challenge idea came from my other game Alphablitz online, but players wanted to join a challenge with a code, in case the link gets lost or they just want to tell a friend.
Smidgen: How do you approach accessibility?
Doug: I'm red-green color blind, and most people who know me know it. Because of that, I try to make games that as many people as possible can play. For Daily Banana, we built in a few things:
- High contrast mode for players with low vision. With it on, the game meets WCAG AAA contrast standards.
- Keyboard accessible. You can play the whole game without a mouse.
- Light and dark mode.
- Reduced motion. You can turn off the moving animations.
- Built for players worldwide. The game uses everyday objects that people around the world recognize, and pages can be translated into your language.
Smidgen: Is there anything still on the to-do list?
Doug: Yes. Translation works, but different languages and dialects have different grammar and sentence structure, so some questions still come out awkward. Fixing that takes detailed work, and it's on the roadmap for the coming weeks.
What's next for Daily Banana
Smidgen: If you had to pitch Daily Banana in one line?
Doug: Daily Banana is a quick daily guessing game where you guess ridiculous measurements for everyday items. Sometimes I'll throw in a fun fact too, like: do you know how many bananas long a bus is?
Smidgen: What are you proudest of so far?
Doug: The vision. I set out to make a simple daily game that my friends and I could play. I also appreciate how the community has grown in the short time the game's been live, with 5300+ players and 7300+ games in the first week and growing day after day.
I love games like this that don't take themselves too seriously. When someone tells me Daily Banana is now part of their daily routine, that warms my heart.
Smidgen: What does success look like?
Doug: That's a great question, and I'm not quite sure yet. I have no plans to make money from this but I do have a donation link to help support costs of servers and hosting. I want a game that's free for everyone, that's more of a social experience, and that helps spread the word about Smidgen and the other games we make.
Maybe down the road we'll add ads to help cover hosting and domain costs. But right now, I'm focused on making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
