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[ahmio]

Do you guys think anyone would be interested in a game similar to pokemon go  but with without the pokemon brand? I feel like these GPS based games are quite interesting, but I'm not sure whether I want to improve on the monster catching formula or make a totally different game.

What do you guys think? An improved pokemon go or another type of game?  (maybe an rpg, or something like monster hunter)

[alvarop]

The Pokemon IP is a huge factor in the popularity of this game. There are other GPS based games that are not as popular : think Ingress (which is by the same dude(s) if I'm not mistaken?) and Geocaching (which is pretty popular, but not as much as Pokemon Go).

Might be worth trying though, but Pokemon ties into the GPS thing seamlessly and this is the game a lot of people were waiting for, so it might be a tough road to success if you wanna make a competitor.

[ahmio]

Fair enough, I'd imagine pokemon is a large part of it. However, ingress is really popular still (Play says 10,000,000 - 50,000,000 downloads). I'm thinking the Pokemon GO craze is gonna die down soon, as it's not really a deep game. Thanks for your input!

[alvarop]

Fair enough, I'd imagine pokemon is a large part of it. However, ingress is really popular still (Play says 10,000,000 - 50,000,000 downloads). I'm thinking the Pokemon GO craze is gonna die down soon, as it's not really a deep game. Thanks for your input!

Yes, it is very popular, just like Geocaching. But nowhere near Pokemon Go. I think the amount of data and analysis to generate interesting real-world play might be astronomical. But I'm just guessing here.

[oahda]

I'm fairly sure their plan is to enable the next generation of Pokémon when the hype starts dying out (since currently only the first generation can be caught). And then the next, and the next.

[Valo]

There have been several GPS based monster-catching games before Pokemon GO. Way before.

If you have not heard about them before, then there's your answer

[voidSkipper]

I think that if you are going to make a GPS-based game that isn't being springboarded by an existing franchise, you need to make sure that it is extremely engaging to play by yourself.

Pokemon GO would not be very fun at all if there weren't a huge amount of people playing it - I can go to the castle in my city and be sure that at any hour, I can have a battle of wits to fight over the gym there. It's fun trying to figure out who your allies are, whether people are bringing out their big guns, etc.

But if it wasn't for that aspect, it would be boring; the battle system is weak and the progression is grindy after a certain point.

Pokemon Go is a lot less fun in less populated areas - some people who work for my company and are stationed in more rural areas can walk for hours without seeing a single Pokemon, and have maybe two Pokestops and no gyms in their entire town.

Niantic has essentially used their franchise springboard to avoid developing around this problem - the game has become so memetic that it is succeeding despite that, and they've been able to get away with not doing the hard work to implement more engaging features as a result.

For example, it would be a lot more challenging if cities were pokestop/pokecenter/gym-rich, but pokemon-deprived, and one had to travel further away from civilisation to find more pokemon. This would also fit in with the theme of the franchise, and the exploration/exercise aspect of the game. Of course, they didn't do this for multiple reasons - one would be that it makes the game less casual, which reduces it's viral reach. Another is that it limits their ability to do business deals like the deal they have going with McDonalds in Japan. Last but not least, which such a wide player base, leading people into rural areas could easily result in class-action lawsuits for lost people, injuries, etc.

However, if you are making a non-springboarded GPS game, all of the above are considerably less pressing; your viral reach is not such a concern, because you'd be focusing on people who are interested in the genre rather than the hype. You're unlikely to be doing business deals with large companies. A smaller player base limits the potential for large-scale class-action.

Thematically though, I don't have any suggestions. There are probably a lot of concepts that would be fun if they were refreshed with AR/GPS.

[ahmio]

I'm fairly sure their plan is to enable the next generation of Pokémon when the hype starts dying out (since currently only the first generation can be caught). And then the next, and the next.

Fair. Doesn't seem like the gameplay is going to get much deeper tho, battles still suck and everything scales terribly.

There have been several GPS based monster-catching games before Pokemon GO. Way before.

If you have not heard about them before, then there's your answer

  Any names tho, I'd like to look into them (see what they did wrong).

I think that if you are going to make a GPS-based game that isn't being springboarded by an existing franchise, you need to make sure that it is extremely engaging to play by yourself.

Pokemon GO would not be very fun at all if there weren't a huge amount of people playing it - I can go to the castle in my city and be sure that at any hour, I can have a battle of wits to fight over the gym there. It's fun trying to figure out who your allies are, whether people are bringing out their big guns, etc.

But if it wasn't for that aspect, it would be boring; the battle system is weak and the progression is grindy after a certain point.

Pokemon Go is a lot less fun in less populated areas - some people who work for my company and are stationed in more rural areas can walk for hours without seeing a single Pokemon, and have maybe two Pokestops and no gyms in their entire town.

Niantic has essentially used their franchise springboard to avoid developing around this problem - the game has become so memetic that it is succeeding despite that, and they've been able to get away with not doing the hard work to implement more engaging features as a result.

For example, it would be a lot more challenging if cities were pokestop/pokecenter/gym-rich, but pokemon-deprived, and one had to travel further away from civilisation to find more pokemon. This would also fit in with the theme of the franchise, and the exploration/exercise aspect of the game. Of course, they didn't do this for multiple reasons - one would be that it makes the game less casual, which reduces it's viral reach. Another is that it limits their ability to do business deals like the deal they have going with McDonalds in Japan. Last but not least, which such a wide player base, leading people into rural areas could easily result in class-action lawsuits for lost people, injuries, etc.

However, if you are making a non-springboarded GPS game, all of the above are considerably less pressing; your viral reach is not such a concern, because you'd be focusing on people who are interested in the genre rather than the hype. You're unlikely to be doing business deals with large companies. A smaller player base limits the potential for large-scale class-action.

Thematically though, I don't have any suggestions. There are probably a lot of concepts that would be fun if they were refreshed with AR/GPS.

You can get sued for that? Wouldn't that be the person's fault if they got lost, etc?

Some good points tho, but how important is the social aspect really? Or is it because there is a lack of anything else? EG. Let's say instead of teams, the top 10 people held the gym (like a ladder almost, you beat the #10, you take his place). Would this be better than the 3 team system?

I feel like having other social aspects (PvP battles, trading, Coop battles, etc) would cover the social aspect better.

[Valo]

I don't remember the names. They were rather unforgettable and since the monster designs were uninspired and not Pokemon, I only played them for 1 day or so. It was around 2011-2012 so it's been awhile.

But now that there's an official version, you have to ask yourself. Why would people play your clone when they can play the real one for free and there are more people playing the original anyways?You would need to have some rather unique angle that appeals to people. Parody might be one way to do it.

[Endurion]

Lego

Have lego pieces lying around and people can come together to build certain items.

[oahda]

I think it pretty much has to be focused on the exploration aspects (including real landmarks, like PG). LEGO's, battles, whatever, I can do that at home in my living room. To attract me to go outside to play, it really has to directly interact with and be intertwined with that outside world in a meaningful way that I really cannot get from my living room consoles or PC.

[s0]

pakomango is pretty much a reskin of ingress fyi

[rj]

pakomango is pretty much a reskin of ingress fyi

with, somehow, actually literally less functionality

[ahmio]

I don't remember the names. They were rather unforgettable and since the monster designs were uninspired and not Pokemon, I only played them for 1 day or so. It was around 2011-2012 so it's been awhile.

But now that there's an official version, you have to ask yourself. Why would people play your clone when they can play the real one for free and there are more people playing the original anyways?You would need to have some rather unique angle that appeals to people. Parody might be one way to do it.

That's too bad. Well, my main selling point would be that there's an actual game  . (eg. Train your pokemon by going for a run, missions to exterminate large pokemon, etc.) There would also be single player features for people who live in the middle of nowhere, etc. Parody could be interesting, but I'm not seeing how I could do it. Any ideas?
Thanks!

Lego

Have lego pieces lying around and people can come together to build certain items.

Not a bad idea, but that would need a massive amount of servers. Servers I don't have  Thanks for the idea tho!

I think it pretty much has to be focused on the exploration aspects (including real landmarks, like PG). LEGO's, battles, whatever, I can do that at home in my living room. To attract me to go outside to play, it really has to directly interact with and be intertwined with that outside world in a meaningful way that I really cannot get from my living room consoles or PC.

Yeah right now I'm using Points of Interest, but these are quite varied (from monuments to supermarkets). The exploration aspect is a really good point.
What do you mean by directly interact, does Pokemon GO directly interact? Thanks for the input!

pakomango is pretty much a reskin of ingress fyi

with, somehow, actually literally less functionality

  They just removed some more too.

[oahda]

pakomango is pretty much a reskin of ingress fyi

Do you catch stuff in Ingress?

What do you mean by directly interact, does Pokemon GO directly interact? Thanks for the input!

Not all too much, no. I'm also not interested in playing that game either. I'm saying that's what I'd want to see, not necessarily that Pokémon Go does it (which doesn't have everything I'd want to see). But it does put stuff at landmarks, which makes sense, and offers information about those landmarks, which is good. That way people actually learn stuff while playing the game. It's not completely mindless. So that lightly mirrors the show and games in that the trainers travel around and see stuff, I guess.

One thing Pokémon Go fails at is making the game playable at all in more rural areas. That's definitely something you could try and do better with your game.

[sonder]

you could make a game about putting all the poor pokemon back in their natural habitat.

[tommy]

I think this would be a good time to make a non-pokemon location based game. As many have noted, Pokemon Go is a fairly shallow game, and sooner or later people are going to get fed up. But a lot of people have now discovered the benefits of location-based gaming (health, social interaction). A lot of these people may now go to the app store and try to find a replacement for Pokemon Go. Even though GPS games have performed poorly in the past, I think PoGo may have opened a door that was previously closed, and there might suddenly be a market for this kind of game.

I think there's a lot of untapped potential here. You could make some kind of a strategy game, where you lead an army around and conquer stuff, or you could make a classical rpg or even a roguelike. Imagine for instance a location based Heroes of Might and Magic.

There are some challenges, though. You're going to have to spend some money on servers. At the very least, you need to find some way to host the maps. Either you could set up your own server, which you set up to serve a stripped-down version of the openstreetmaps maps, or you could try to find some existing hosting solution that would let you hook your game up to it. I'm not sure if it's possible to use Google Maps in a way that does not make Google unhappy.

If you want to have multiplayer in your game, then the hosting requirements increase pretty sharply. Now you suddenly need to make all important decisions for all players on the server (to avoid people cheating by using modified clients), so now you need quite a lot of cpu, ram and bandwidth, depending on how many players you expect to have. This was Niantic's problem, because they did not expect to get such an insane amount of users so quickly. They were able to scrounge up the money and upgrade their servers fairly quickly, but this would be more difficult for an indie developer.

Another challenge is that of seasons. In large areas of the world, we have distinct summer and winter seasons. In my part of the world (Norway), it's significantly more attractive to walk around outside and catch digital monsters in summer than in any of the other seasons (if it's -10 celsius and snowing outside, I'm not even pulling my phone out while walking to work). Part of the reason Pokemon Go became so popular in Norway, was because it was launched at exactly the right time of year.

[oahda]

you could make a game about putting all the poor pokemon back in their natural habitat.

+1

[ahmio]

pakomango is pretty much a reskin of ingress fyi

Do you catch stuff in Ingress?

What do you mean by directly interact, does Pokemon GO directly interact? Thanks for the input!

Not all too much, no. I'm also not interested in playing that game either. I'm saying that's what I'd want to see, not necessarily that Pokémon Go does it (which doesn't have everything I'd want to see). But it does put stuff at landmarks, which makes sense, and offers information about those landmarks, which is good. That way people actually learn stuff while playing the game. It's not completely mindless. So that lightly mirrors the show and games in that the trainers travel around and see stuff, I guess.

One thing Pokémon Go fails at is making the game playable at all in more rural areas. That's definitely something you could try and do better with your game.

Yeah, I think I've already solved the rural/suburban problem. So, from what I'm understanding, you'd want the game to encourage you to explore new places / see new landmarks, etc?

you could make a game about putting all the poor pokemon back in their natural habitat.

Maybe you catch them because they were lost in the middle of the city?  Missions or something could be cool tho, like maybe you're neighborhood gets infested with a specific type of pokemon, and you need to catch and release ## of pokemon into the wild.

I think this would be a good time to make a non-pokemon location based game. As many have noted, Pokemon Go is a fairly shallow game, and sooner or later people are going to get fed up. But a lot of people have now discovered the benefits of location-based gaming (health, social interaction). A lot of these people may now go to the app store and try to find a replacement for Pokemon Go. Even though GPS games have performed poorly in the past, I think PoGo may have opened a door that was previously closed, and there might suddenly be a market for this kind of game.

I think there's a lot of untapped potential here. You could make some kind of a strategy game, where you lead an army around and conquer stuff, or you could make a classical rpg or even a roguelike. Imagine for instance a location based Heroes of Might and Magic.

There are some challenges, though. You're going to have to spend some money on servers. At the very least, you need to find some way to host the maps. Either you could set up your own server, which you set up to serve a stripped-down version of the openstreetmaps maps, or you could try to find some existing hosting solution that would let you hook your game up to it. I'm not sure if it's possible to use Google Maps in a way that does not make Google unhappy.

If you want to have multiplayer in your game, then the hosting requirements increase pretty sharply. Now you suddenly need to make all important decisions for all players on the server (to avoid people cheating by using modified clients), so now you need quite a lot of cpu, ram and bandwidth, depending on how many players you expect to have. This was Niantic's problem, because they did not expect to get such an insane amount of users so quickly. They were able to scrounge up the money and upgrade their servers fairly quickly, but this would be more difficult for an indie developer.

Another challenge is that of seasons. In large areas of the world, we have distinct summer and winter seasons. In my part of the world (Norway), it's significantly more attractive to walk around outside and catch digital monsters in summer than in any of the other seasons (if it's -10 celsius and snowing outside, I'm not even pulling my phone out while walking to work). Part of the reason Pokemon Go became so popular in Norway, was because it was launched at exactly the right time of year.

I'm using Mapzen right now, and it's really solid, but I'm not sure how well it'll scale. Eventually, if the game starts taking off, I will get some servers. You're definitely right about the multiplayer tho, and the cheating is definetly a big concern, but I'm hoping there's a way to combat this without reporting everything to the server.

Strategy and rougelike were my first ideas, but I can't see how to make these work with GPS. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

I'm in Canada, trust me I have winter in mind  I'm thinking some audio-based gameplay could help combat this (eg. take your pokemon for a walk, your phone is closed and all input is through earphones).

You raise some really good points tho. Thanks a bunch!

[oahda]

So, from what I'm understanding, you'd want the game to encourage you to explore new places / see new landmarks, etc?

TBH I don't think I'm in the target audience for this sort of stuff. Many reasons I'm avoiding Pokémon Go. I just think it makes sense that a GPS game should do that, otherwise I don't see the point of it being a GPS game in the first place.