Suggestions and Mobile App idea

[Myles Athas]

Hello,

 

I have noticed the idea, and think the theory of this is good, however as this relies on the goodwill of the people involved, I'd like to put a few suggestions?

 

Timezone and Availability sensitive: Games like WoW have scheduled raid events, and players won't want interrupting during those. Having the ability to set when you are 'available' to help would be very useful. Also priortizing perhaps on who lives in what timezone, so you can target alerts to an area where more players are online at once. Be able to sign in and out easily, a tick box or something.

 

Mobile App: This is a little ambitious, but let's see if I can explain what I'm thinking.

 

If a "IRL Responder" creates an account with yourselves advising when/where they would be willing to respond to events and such, with the positive responses recieved they could build up "credit" eventually to use in various games that co-operate?

 

Also, as a working proof of concept it could be used for showing the interest the gaming community has, and a selling point to games you are interested in getting such access to.

 

Having an app that can recieve a notification to your device like the the http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php team do, along with a customisable profile of when you would like to recieve notifications, and the area you're in - you don't want notifications at night for example. Also with options to download image content over wifi / data as some people's mobile data plan may suffer with this.

 

There are a few holes in the idea above, it's literally nothing more than theorycrafting and whole cloth at this stage, but I do like the principle of what you are trying to do.

[Peter Mosur]

Hey Myles,

Thanks for joining!

Having player availability is a good idea; having them essentially say "This is when I would be willing to help". We are definitely looking at a bunch of options regarding this because we don't want players to feel like IRL is intruding on their game time. Other solutions include opting-in as opposed to opting-out, and not sending notifications top players in combat / in a dungeon.

And as for the mobile app... Yes! We definitely think that it would be good to have a mobile version of IRL, well because why not? Currently we are developing our web-app in javascript, but once that is finished the only place to go from there is mobile. We definitely plan to have android and ios versions of it. Perhaps you know how to code in such languages? :)

But regardless, the proof-of-concept is a strong factor. Having x amount of people simply download the app onto their phones would be a great backing behind the whole project!

[mad_cat]

Actually, to save time and scalability, you can use a 3rd party tool that allows you to create a Javascript wrapper to be used in Android and Apple, so all you have to do is create one set of code and to be compiled by both and uploaded.  This way, we can stay consistent on new features.  However, be aware that while posting new apps and updates on Android is an easy process, for Apple it is difficult.  It can take a couple of weeks for any new app or update, and they can easily deny us for any reason, so it is best that we are aware of their policies and make the app to that standard.  Plus, using a 3rd party tool like this, might help expand us into RIM (Blackberry) and Windows phone.  Yes they are a small niche market, they also are fighting for the #3 spot.  My company wants to do Mobile gaming and we are primarily Android, but we plan to get our games in other markets.

NOTE: Even with a 3rd party tool, we are still required to use Mac OSX to upload to apple as we have to use their native editor to compile it to Apple's standard.  There is no way to do this on Windows that I am aware of, at least no legal way.

[Peter Mosur]

This is a great idea! I definitely had a notion that something like this existed but wasn't entirely sure. Do you know what it's called?

[mad_cat]

There are too many tools to list, but the choices comes down to which platforms are supported and what they use to create the program.  They may use their own language and output it to HTML5 or Javascript, or use either one as a wrapper for their code.  Some are free, others cost money.  It won't be an easy decision on which one to go with.

RhoMobile
Appcelerator
WidgetPad
PhoneGap
MoSync
Whoop
Unity (though this is more for 3D gaming)

For a more complete list: http://www.mobyaffiliates.com/blog/ios-android-mobile-game-development-tools-frameworks-engines-resources/

[Peter Mosur]

Thanks! This list will definitely come in handy!