Hey guys,

Just thought I'd quickly share an idea I had for a mobile augmented reality type game -- I have no plans in the short term to actually develop the game in question, so feel free to steal/change/do-anything-you-want with the idea -- just thought it was a cool idea that might be worth sharing.


Players would sign up from a website or via mobile apps, which would be available for iOS and Android devices, and game-play would be largely or entirely via the mobile apps.


The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a paranormal investigator looking for signs of ghosts, spirits, alien activity, etc. These creatures and the signs they leave are not visible to normal human senses however, so the mobile app provides players with a set of tools -- special camera modes, EMF sensors, etc.

These would of course all be simple gimicky tricks, but we could for example provide a camera which "detects different, usually non-visible light spectrums", by accessing the phone's camera and then overlaying out own graphics on the resulting image. By accessing the GPS for location information we could put these in specific places, and players could track different sorts of "activity".


Awards could be given for things like being the first player to detect a certain activity, for getting additional different information about a previously discovered occurrence, or for discovering related activities. Players could also be given options to somehow deal with "hostile" presences, or to "help trapped spirits".


What does everyone think? Would this be a fun game? Would you play it? Can you think of any potential problems and possible solutions to them, or do you have extra ideas that could enhance such a game? Is anyone already working on such a game?

I think it has really good potential! It also provides plenty of social interactions!
It would basically be old-school treasure hunt with tech. I think I'd like it.

I'll be honest, I've been thinking at this AR thing for a while but I couldn't find anything useful. I've indeed looked at some AR stuff on OpenAR.net involving buying houses and tourist related, the tech is definitively here!

I'm not going to do that.

The tech is absolutely there for it; because we're looking at presenting paranormal activities/spirits/whatnot it would be acceptable to take shortcuts that would be a deal-breaker for other applications; where interior decorating and property sales often involve the use of a real-world marker to ensure the augmented reality graphics are over-laid in a precise and correct position we could easily explain away small differences or errors in positioning, and even things like having our graphics accidentally intersect with a wall or solid object need not be a deal-breaker for immersion.


There could be a random chance of an event occurring no matter where a particular player is, and then by allowing the player to report that information we could provide a similar experience in the same location or near-by for other players. I absolutely love the idea that a group of different players who don't necessarily know each other could end up working together to document and try to explain a particular in-game event.

That sounds like a great idea to build up a solid set of suitable locations rather than just locating things randomly!

You could also have events which recur on a specific schedule that players would need to discover to solve a particular mystery -- think for an example a spirit which manifests every Tuesday after being killed on a regular night out, or a larger-scale event that occurs less frequently but could potentially draw a larger crowd of players.


Keeping to public locations is probably a good idea for safety and legal reasons, but your mention of it brings to mind an interesting/different options for monetization, where businesses or organisations could agree to host an in-game event in exchange for the crowd it might draw; if they were selling drinks, appropriate souvenirs, etc. and the game was popular it could make a good marketing gimmick and easily get some people in the door.

As a side note, this made me think about Elebits (Wii). The game revolved around capturing this little energetic creatures hidden in familiar settings. Just writing from brainstorming reasons.

A problem with player generated locations is of course the "chicken and egg"-problem, so you would have to not only depend on this.

Absolutely. I think if I were to try implementing this I would use three approaches to begin seeding the system with initial content for the first players to get started:

1. Pick some random, well travelled public places in random cities, and manually (or perhaps using a semi-automated approach) add them to the system as "event sites" with some sort of event that would recur regularly for at least a while -- perhaps even until x number of players have interacted with it. I would probably start by seeding US, UK and Australian capital cities in this manner, being sure to pick at least one major location in each. The events in question should also (at least initially) be more obvious ones, rather than relying on the smaller chance of players stumbling onto something subtle.
   
2. Create and manually add to the system some "major" events that will be viewable/detectable from a wide area -- think "lights over the <whatever-city> skyline type things -- and then slip some sort of notice into the system that there will be something to look at, giving an exact date and fairly accurate time so that interested players wouldn't have to wait around too long if they're interested. At least a couple of these events would be set to recur a week or two later, again with warning, so that friends of any initial players might be persuaded to also check it out.
   
3. Have a weighted random chance that some event might occur ANY time a player is using the game tools, and allow the player to report this so that other players can check it out. You would of course need to do some basic checking with mapping data, etc. to make sure you don't encourage break-ins/trespassing/etc. Any time a randomly-generated event of this sort occurred you would communicate it back to the game and inform other clients in the area to also display an event. Things that would increase the chance of an event randomly occurring would be:
   
   
   
   • If the player in question has never detected an event, we should boost the chance of them finding one -- unless we detect they're already at the site of an existing recurring event.
     
   • If the player in question is in a location that is not near any existing events in the system, we should give a big boost to the chance to start seeding the area with an event -- where possible this scenario should be more likely to be a recurring event and/or one that moves around the local area in a pattern players could discover and track.
     
   • If a player is in a location that has already been marked as a "possible event site", "creepy" or similar and there isn't an existing event in the system there we should boost the chance of a random event being created.
     
   • We should DECREASE the chance of a random event occurring if the player is near a site that already has an event -- it should still be possible, and would occasionally lead to busy sites with a lot going on, but the chance should be much lower of secondary or tertiary events being added to any given location. The chances of anything beyond a tertiary event being added at any particular location should be almost unthinkable.
     

You could also help to kick-start the system by pre-adding some votes to the system that certain locations are "creepy" based on existing local lore, etc. to take advantage of existing ghost stories and the fact that potential players might try out visiting such places when trying out the game.