Thoughts
A sketch of a game:
Single-player, AR, interactive, exercise experience.
Pick a “route” (a continuously runnable/walkable stretch, around 2 miles)
Setup around 200 “landmarks” (trees, stop signs, utility access hatches and rocks along the route)
Start a “session” in the app
Have the app randomly “link” around 10 pairs of 2 close landmarks (around 100-300 ft apart)
(You are not told where these links are)
Travel along the route (discovery—looking for links)
Have the app trigger a “sprint” automatically when you arrive at a landmark with a link
Sprint to the landmark which is linked to your current landmark
Have the app score you based on your speed
End the session once you’ve discovered all of the links
The goal here is high replayability. I get really bored doing runs along the same stretch of road. I get locked in to looking at the ground, and my brain starts thinking about other things. This would be new every time, because the links would be in different places, and it would be interactive, you would have to pay attention to where the links the are and where you’re sprinting to.
I’m trying to avoid Ingress and Pokémon Go, which are interactive AR, but you’re interacting with your phone. I want to interact with the world, which is hard to do in a single-player constraint. I think geohashing gets close with ‘you have to go to this place’ but it misses any sense of urgency or excitement. My third inspiration is Flags (my conception of a 1,000 flag scavenger hunt). I never got to run Flags because of COVID (which is ironic because it was conceived as a game that was playable outside while social distancing). Flags has excitement when you find a flag or find out how many points it’s worth. But even a scavenger hunt doesn’t have “interactive excitement.” All of the skill is in the “discovery phase” and so the exciting part—when you actually find the flag—is actually the least interactive part because you just collect it. If your heart rate goes up when you find a hidden flag, that’s irrational. Of course, this is all an attempt to mimic the excitement of my fourth (one true) inspiration, HvZ.
I don’t see any obviously flaws—which could just mean it’s consistently bad. The biggest issue is I have 0 time to program a new app.