@BaldSavant @peterdrake Before pokemon go, we had Ingress. In fact, it's the same company, and the pokemon gym thingies are originally ingress nodes. :) The game's still around I believe.
@trinsec @BaldSavant Okay, but what about games that don't take advantage of location?
@peterdrake
Could you elaborate a bit more on player activities there? I'm not sure what you're searching for and I'd just recommend regular mobile games then.
@trinsec @BaldSavant What sorts of UI or simulated actions can the player perform within the game?
For example, mobile (which uses touch screens) seems very bad at:
Hitting a control with precise timing
Pointing precisely
Displaying large amounts of detailed information
They seem okay at:
Pointing at things imprecisely
Sliding things around
They may have advantages in:
Detection of the tilt of the device
Multi-touch gestures
Starting the game ASAP (without taking several minutes to boot up a device)
Consequently, something like Diablo, where you have to navigate around a large world, point precisely under time pressure in combat, and manage complex inventory or crafting, would be horrible on a mobile device. Candy Crush and Angry Birds, on the other hand, work nicely.
My agenda here is that we're starting to think about the third of our earthquake preparedness games. Because of the audience we're trying to reach (18-to-29-year-olds across all socioeconomic levels), we think mobile might be a good way to go, but it's tough to build an adventure / survival game for mobile.
@peterdrake @trinsec @BaldSavant Look into Fallout Shelter, if you haven't already. They managed to make a base-building game (traditionally the realm of PCs) built largely around time mechanics. They primarily did so by simplifying the management/building mechanics and putting certain aspects on hours-long (or even days-long) timers to incentivize the user to come back then and play more.
The key with mobile seems to be incentivizing short but frequent sessions at every turn, which is a big reason why exploration doesn't work as well (it requires building on spatial knowledge you've forgotten).
For a survival game on mobile, I'd start with the core game session loop: You probably want to start a session by letting a player react to 'what happened while they were away'. Then, once they've resolved any immediate crises, they have some downtime to use any new resources that were collected to advance their progress. Then, before logging off, they kick off some new jobs (explore the cave, construct the building, etc) that will start timers that will run idly in the background and inform the player when they should log back in next.
