I'm officially admitting to myself that I'm done working on TIBO. It's mechanically complete, I'm out of ideas for creatures, and I don't enjoy the restrictions I set for myself on the art style anymore. In honor of this recognition, I'm going to write up the lessons learned from it before I forget them. Hopefully some of them transfer for another locative game someone puts together.

In-Betweens

Mostly-automatic gameplay: I tend to default to this when I'm planning out a locative game. It's because what I really want to do is go for a walk and have something else going on besides just staring at houses from the sidewalk as I pace through the suburb. If the game activity is too engaging or time-consuming, it tends to make me stop while I focus on the game. If the game activity is too light or simple, it doesn't really add anything or make me want to pull out my phone to participate. This also needs to be looked at when thinking about the potential audience: am I trying to get active people to play a game that might slow them down, or do I want to get sedentary people to start moving and use this as the hook to get them up and out? It's 2 separate audiences and getting both with the same activity isn't likely. It'll be harder to judge if a game is good when I make one for the audience I'm not a part of as well.

Alliterative mode names: I thought it was fun. It is starting to confuse me now that I'm not buried in the code. I have to keep checking which mode is which and that proves that its not a great idea even if it makes it stand out slightly.

Regional focus: Making the game set in Ohio helped dramatically for managing interesting and specific Places and content. That sort of attention can't be done on a global scale, or as a generic Area-only game. You could try, but you'll just end up highlighting stuff that's already famous and won't be able to bring up any particularly interesting or novel places in any number. However, Ohio is an area that gets meme'd on pretty hard and doesn't have the biggest player base to cater to. Florida has the 'Florida Man' headline meme prove itself out each week, but it has twice the population and a tourism industry cycling in visitors that the Buckeye State doesn't. I don't regret this choice but I have to point out that the drawback to it was probably stronger than I originally estimated.

Good Ideas

Varying in-game effects with terrain: This makes going places worth it, and is a solid core idea proven out for locative games. This is marginally noticeable in Pokemon Go, and I made it much more pronounced in TIBO.

Math to make rural play worthwhile*:* I spent a lot of time with this goal in the back of my mind, and eventually I worked out a solid answer for it. It may not transfer over as well to a different genre of game, but the principle will probably be transferable outside of the collect-a-thon setup TIBO has.

Modes that work for dense and sparse areas: This was also a proving out of a PraxisMapper split. Treating Areas and Places as 2 separate concepts the way PM does lets you work both into gameplay, and you need to make sure you don't just rely on one of them alone. Only using Places excludes a lot of rural and suburban areas from play. Only using Areas doesn't allow you to make Areas vary from each other in any siginificantly meaningful way. You need both for the best game.

Active Challenges: I didn't always have this on, but when I did, it was fun. This might get revisited in a future project, and have some way of opting in to a more focused gameplay mode instead of the simpler, automatic setup I tend to default to.

Small-scale locative game: You can absolutely make a game that only covers a particular area and have it work. Most people aren't even going to get out of a county-sized area in their usual routine, though you can't rely on that area lining up nicely with actual county boundaries in real life.

Bad Ideas

Modes as an implementation: Splitting up the gameplay into 4 separate active modes was good for learning how to get the client going and thinking about interactions. It was not great for actually playing, when the passive Collect mode results weren't available to you when claiming areas or scouting the map for places to go. Or when you're walking around managing areas or places and aren't getting the resources you need to actually improve those. Or making progress in Control mode and not participating in Compete. Maybe both of those didn't need to be in the same app? As a demonstration of PraxisMapper's capabilities, having both is good. As a standalone game, this was kinda silly. It would have been better overall to make one gameplay mode with multiple interactions instead of splitting them out into mulitple, simple modes.

PvP without a player base: I noticed this in late development and worked on Cover mode to provide a single-player mode based on a multiplayer mode. That doesn't make Cover mode a good mode on it's own, though. This is a chicken-and-egg problem for any multiplayer game, since you can't play without a base and you need a base for people to be able to play. This is also aggravated by a lack of resources for marketing.

Expecting a hobby to be successful: Getting attention on a project in the current saturated media environments that games are means that you need to put significant resources on marketing (so the game is seen) and polish (so the game stands out). As a side project, I'm unable to do either of those to the point necessary to succeed. My reaction to this is unlikely to be cutting out my family, day job, or anything else to make more room for a hobby to be marginally successful, and instead will likely be the opposite: future games are unlikely to be shared at all or built to be played by anyone that isn't a personal friend. Dropping the pretense that I could be a breakout hit will feel better than constantly thinking I could if I tried harder at things I do not enjoy and do poorly at.