@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 phone games can initiate interactions at any time with a reasonable expectation of promptly being seen. For something like an emergency preparedness game, time-gating means you could leverage that to simulate having to react immediately, which is a feature not generally available on a console or PC which spends a lot of its life turned off with the player not in the room.
For example, the game could schedule a notification for a particular time, and then the user has only a limited window to complete a mission where he navigates his avatar to safety. Finish by the deadline, and he gets XP toward the next level. Level up, and he gets challenged with harder missions - maybe he has to save a child before escaping, or ride out the first wave in a semi-safe location and then evacuate before the aftershocks hit, etc.
Location was also brought up, and at least on Android that includes altitude. How high above ground level are you when the notification goes off, about four storeys? The game generates a four-storey-tall map for your mission. This way you make things as relevant to the player's circumstances as you can, which might help if your purpose is ultimately to improve the player's real-life awareness of earthquake safety.
@khird @trinsec @BaldSavant Lots of good ideas here!
Note that we're not just concerned with what to do at the moment a quake strikes and immediately thereafter. We're also concerned with preparedness and with surviving and thriving in the weeks afterward (during which, in the case of a Cascadia Subduction Zone event, outside help may not be available).
@khird @trinsec @BaldSavant The first issue is addressed a bit in the existing, web-based game 1:
https://peterdrake.itch.io/cascadia90
(It's also addressed in the upcoming game 2.)
The second one is also interesting!
@peterdrake fair enough! I live in weather risk country, not seismic risk country, so I don't actually know much about how to prepare for an earthquake (or even what to do in the moment, really). I'd simply figured that promoting a mindset of "this bad thing could happen to you out of the blue, in the sort of places you actually spend your time" might prompt people to consider it more seriously in their daily lives, and mobile games offer a way to do that which you can't get on other platforms.
Looking at the ready.gov recommendations, the two things that come to mind are:
Keeping the surroundings safe: The player can do non-time-gated minigames where he rearranges shelves of knickknacks to put the heavy stuff closer to the floor. Maybe he gets an XP multiplier on the next time-gated mission based on how well he arranges things.
Memorising contact info in case your phone is damaged: The player adds in a handful of emergency contacts and the game periodically challenges him to recite a particular contact's phone number by memory. This can leverage the fact that he probably has these in his contact list already (another advantage unique to mobile) so reentering them is unnecessary. You can also detect focus loss and mark the task failed if he switches away to cheat by looking it up in another app.
@trinsec @BaldSavant