Mobile location based games. This is still a fledgling genre. But not many of them scratch the itch of online/shared world empire building.
There are some that try and scratch the empire building niche but they don’t go far with the idea, or their implementation is kind of janky with older or awkward user experiences.
So…
I started building my own
A location based, persistent, multiplayer, economy and industry sim.
A few years ago I was inspired by some of these games to build my own. After a couple years of development, I proved all the core technologies. It was at this point that I realized that without a community and without garnering interest, no matter how good of a game I made, it was still slated to die against the waves of slop on the app store.
It sat on the back burner for a bit but I’ve been interested in restarting the project recently. As part of that I want to see what sort of interest and ideas other folks have.
The Concept
The concept of the game (Heavily inspired by Resources, with the same gameplay loop), is that you are the owner of a corporation and can go around in the real world scanning for resources.
These resources are distributed in a manner that tries to match their real world properties. Certain resources that are often mined alongside each other can be mined together.
Once you find resources that you care about, you can place down mines to gather those resources. Since this is a persistent world, there is some sense of scarcity for certain resources as once someone else is placed mines there you cannot.
You can then use factories to refine those raw materials, and to manufacture products out of those raw materials. You can upgrade mines, your factories, your manufacturing capabilities…etc these refinement and manufacturing chains are also based off of their real world counterparts. Certain metals like copper and aluminum are incredibly difficult to refine and the efficiency of that refining process is based on the technologies you are using for that refinement.
A real player market is where you can buy and sell materials and products. You can either sell or buy materials for the purpose of manufacturing or you can play the market and make money through speculation.
Pressures are put on you in the form of mine upkeep, over time your mind’s degrade and you will need to spend money or resources to maintain them. Natural disasters can affect the productivity of your mines and factories within certain geographical regions or even do damage to them.
You have a workforce and that workforce costs money to maintain and keep happy. The regional and global workforces of all players drive a level of economic consumption and need, alongside your natural growth and technological advancement.
Increase your manufacturing capabilities and technologies by unlocking them as part of a tech tree. As you progress, you are able to build and research technologies to not only unlock new products and manufacturing capabilities but boost productivity and efficiency.
…etc
Okay, that’s a lot of words
Essentially:
- Real world resource distribution, based on common geography and realistic resource availability.
- manufacturing and processing chains grounded in how these materials are produced for real
- A full technology tree and progression
- A player driven economy
- various upgrade paths for your mines, factories and other buildings
- A “Headquarters” Which is an area with limited land availability for you to place billions like factories and refining.
- The amount of land available for your headquarters is upgradable as you progress
- Competition against players both for resources on the map, economic size, and leaderboards.
- Direct trading, contracts, and sales between corporations
…etc
Who here has an interest in games like these? And what sort of empire building itch can this scratch for you?
Idk about the whole corporation vibe. I’d personally go for “pure” industry. All players are working to grow a huge factory because we all know t̳̖̮͕͙h͈̪ͪ͊̈̿̍̐͢ĕ̪͖͔̃̃͛̄͌̚ ͉̙͈̩̩̬̪̓̉f̘̈ͭá҉̟c͔͖͌̚͡t̨͙̖̖̹͚̬͐ͧ͛̀̈́ò̻̼̙r̢̙͒́̂y̔ͫ͛̆ͥ̍͏̲̯͍̫͚̣͚ ͎̽̾̓̋͋̇m̹̣̙ͦ̿̑͡ȕ̝͕̑̿͒s̛̀̓̔̊t̗͈̦̽̀̆̃ ̠̯͕̀͒̃g̿̾̾̅͑͟ȑ̠̃ͨ̿͌̿̉o̿̽͂̐̒ͫ҉͔̲͚̺̲w̧͗͑͆̄̆ͦ̾
Hey that’s totally valid!
I’m an avid player of Factorio and Dyson Sphere Project. Those really scratch the pure factory itch.
I’m aiming to scratch a different itch here. Persistent empire building in competition with others over finite resources is an itch that’s REALLY hard to scratch. And that’s what I’m aiming for here.
That sense that you have built something that feels more tangible than other games you’re accustomed to. There’s a real world element, you control something that someone else cannot, with that comes that empire building feeling I personally live, and want to build a game around.
my understanding is that games like this have to track your location and store that location history for obvious reasons. I think Pokémon go was bought by Saudi Arabia or something like that, and that made me wary. what is your plan for protecting and anonimizing this data, and are you planning to sell it to third parties?
otherwise, I’m a huge fan of games like mindustry on android
Great question, and one I’ve struggled with.
I’m a big privacy advocate, and my personal devices and home network reflect that. Which really brings me to a difficult crossroads here.
I don’t have a good answer for you right now, the best I have are the problems I’m trying to balance:
- Anticheat: How do detect and build better detection for location spoofing? This, intrinsically, requires the recording of directly associated location data. And the collection of mass anonymized data in order to determine “what looks normal”, to spot abnormal (spoofing) behavior. How can I balance this against privacy concerns? It’s a rough one for sure.
- This is the toughest one here. Likely I’ll need a combination of data retention periods and anonymization. At the very least sensitive data is separated from the rest of the game data, and is encrypted at rest. Likely there are clever protocols and solutions already out there I just don’t know about yet that can improve protections here.
- Audit Logs: When a player performs an action that interacts with a location-based feature, where they where when that action was performed it is stored alongside the audit log of that action. This ties in closely with Anticheat, and also enables pattern matching to try and find oddities (exploits, cheating, bugs, and other problems).
- Right now these stay around forever, and can be used to simulate the global game state at any point in the past (really REALLY useful for debugging problems, especially when you don’t have a good repro). Eventually such state should make granular rollbacks possible in case of exploits or rampant cheating. (A game where you have to physically go somewhere to capture a mine means rollbacks have a crazy high cost, making them granular is pretty important)
- Analytics and Telemetry: Location data isn’t in use here right now. And I don’t see how it would be while also respecting privacy.
Selling the data: 😂😂😂 I’d rather light my servers on fire than stoop to that level.
- Anticheat: How do detect and build better detection for location spoofing? This, intrinsically, requires the recording of directly associated location data. And the collection of mass anonymized data in order to determine “what looks normal”, to spot abnormal (spoofing) behavior. How can I balance this against privacy concerns? It’s a rough one for sure.
Sounds cool. I think there is a lot of untapped potential in location based games. Games like Ingress and Pokemon Go barely scratched the surface.
Shadow Cities was really fun back in the day. Despite coming out so long ago, I think it was the best location based game. I’m disappointed and a bit surprised that nobody ever recreated it. Niantic tried, but they never really captured the magic of it. Pokemon go was fun for a short time, but got boring fast. I think it was a huge missed opportunity to not have actual Pokemon battles, especially PvP.
They eventually got around to it, but by that time the game was so overmonetized that getting anything good to use in PvP required a bunch of cash or all of your time grinding.
I’d give it a shot, but I honestly leave my home only once a week, which makes these types of games less appealing to me.
I almost never travel either.
I’d still play a game that let me use/invest in local resources generously, and unlock more areas with travel.
I’d never be competitive in such a game, but I’m comfortable with that.
Are you telling me there is going to be factorio in real world now? This is the best idea for a mobile AR game I have read. But scrap the natural disasters. Doesn’t sound like they add any fun.
