I submitted Relativia, an augmented reality RPG/Puzzle hybrid in the Games: Casual/Puzzle. Sounds like that category is going to be crowded. :)
In Relativia, you create a character from one of four species (Human, Elf, Lepus, or Lupus) and one of four classes (Mystic, Monk, Merc, or Mech). You play be entering the map view and searching for points of interest (e.g. dungeons and markets) near you. Dungeons are mapped onto local coffee shops and hotels, while markets are mapped onto local groceries. To enter a point of interest, you must physically travel to within 100m of the location, at which point a splash screen notifies you that you're near enough, and may enter the dungeon/ market. Combat is in the form of a turn-based game similar to Connect Four. You and your opponent take turns dropping tokens into a grid. If you match 3 or more in a row you either collect mana (used to cast spells in combat), gem dust (used to buy stuff in markets), or skulls (which cause direct damage). Combat ends when one player's HP fall below zero. If you've ever played Puzzle Quest or its variants, the concept is somewhat similar. You must physically travel to markets to buy items such as weapons and armor. While searching for points of interest, the map view overlays dungeon and market icons on their physical locations. When you touch an icon, it tells you the name of the location (e.g. Starbucks), address, and distance in mi/km. There are only five quests, 12 items, 3 spells for each class, and 8 kinds of enemies, but I did the bulk of the work myself, and it was a slog, let me tell you. I got into Android app development about 6 months ago when a friend who works at Google gave me the the G1 dev phone he'd gotten as a holiday bonus. He didn't want it (he was already an avid iPhone user). I loved the phone, and after poking around I found the SDK. I have experience with Java, though no formal training. I'm a grad student who does computational modeling. I thought writing apps would be a nice way to supplement my meager assistantship income. I formed Polyclef Software and started churning out apps. My first game was Spades and an ad-supported version, Spades Free. I've since put out a number of simple card games. When I heard about the ADC II, I had a folder full of ideas. My top two candidates were an inventory app and Relativia. I figured there would be steep competition in the games categories, but it seemed a lot more fun, and a sexier idea. I found an artist in an independent game developers forum and commissioned him for the artwork. I had commissioned music for a previous game, and ended up using some of that in Relativia. I wanted to try to develop a game that wasn't just a smaller version of a game that could run on a PC, but a truly mobile game. I wasn't aware that the idea of mobile RPGs had already been implemented on Android (Parallel Kingdoms), but I thought my particular take might have some advantages. I thought the puzzle approach to combat would work well (Puzzle Quest was extremely popular). Originally I had envisioned a free-range approach, where every element of the game landscape would overlap the real world, but I worried about legal and logistical issues (what if a node of iron ore was in the middle of a highway, or someone's back yard?). So I restricted the augmented reality aspect to searchable commercial locations. This potentially has a unique monetization potential, i.e., businesses that want to drive customers to their physical locations could pay a fee to have their business name generated as a search term for points of interest. Right now the search terms are generic, but could easily be replaced with specific business names. Anyway, I don't know if that will pan out, or if the game will even be fun to play. At least a few friends have reacted negatively to the idea of compelling people to physically travel to other locations to unlock game elements (e.g., it's environmentally unsound). But I hoped it would add the feeling of actually questing. We'll see. I don't have a website up (I'm still exhausted from the development this summer), but I will soon. I did 90% of the programming, though I used some open-source resources for some of the map stuff, and outsourced much of the art and all of the music. As for the way the challenge has been administrated? I wish there were more communication from Google. We didn't hear a peep out of them until the last week in August, and many devs were beginning to wonder if the challenge was still on, or would be delayed. I'm still not sure how the user voting will work. What will they do if the voter sample is extremely small? It's going to skew the results badly. I'm just happy to have completed the app on time (I submitted it Saturday). I learned an awful lot, and completed the most complex app I'd done by far (which also means there's a lot more potential for things to go wrong, but I'll try not to think about that. Anyway, good luck to all the entrants. Hopefully I'll see you at the finish line. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
