Motivation • Goals • Example Franchises • Issues • Contributing • License
"Anything GO" is a collection of Pokémon GO inspired augmented reality game concepts and defines everything needed to implement a similar game for any franchise or community.
Note that this project is in its very early stages. But if you like the idea give it a star and help getting things done by starting/commenting a discussion with your thoughts on the issues page. Thank you for your help!
Pokémon GO was released not long ago and it has already been a huge succes with an immediate hype all around the world. We too love the idea of taking gamers outside, getting them to discover new places, meet new people and even make them feel like they are part of a different world right within our own.
But at the same time we think that Pokémon GO is overly commercialized and doesn't appeal to everybody – especially those who can't identify themselves with Pokémon. Also it (currently) lacks of many basic social features like seeing the progress of friends or connecting with other players around you. We think we can do better in some areas.
Our main goal is to bring the great ideas behind Pokémon GO to other franchises and communities so that not only Pokémon fans but every smartphone user can profit from the motivational effect the game has on moving more, discovering places and meeting people.
The particular goals of this specific respository are:
- Analyze the concepts behind Pokémon GO with respect to the following questions:
- What makes people start to play the game?
- What makes people move (go outside) when playing the game?
- What makes people discover new places?
- What makes people socialize with other players? (Does it?)
- What makes people stay motivated and play the game long-term?
- Find the weaknesses and disadvantages – using experiences made by players
- Use the concept and weakness analysis results to develop a refined set of concepts
- Add more ideas and features to enhance the social part of the game
Note that implementing the concepts is not part of this repository. Everybody is free to use, change and mix all ideas, concepts and results of this repository and write their own implementations as long as they comply to our license (for commercial usage, please contact Cihat Gündüz).
There will be an official implementation of a web-backend written in Ruby on Rails and a client written in Swift for iOS though. Those will be reference core implementations and are necessary to make sure the developed concepts within this project work in practice. It is likely that they will lack the sophisticated graphical interfaces and contents compared to the original Pokémon GO game. So don't expect a full game as a result in the basic examples. We will do our best, however, to make sure the examples are as extensible as possible. This will ensure other developers can build on the examples as a core and create unique instances of the game for their favorite franchise or their own community.
Currently the web-backend and iOS projects aren't started yet. Once they are, they will be linked here.
In order to make sure the concepts actually make sense and also that developers have an easier time to understand what we mean we are gonna use an example franchise when developing the concepts. Namely the example franchise is Harry Potter. This means when discussing and explaining the concepts we are gonna give examples of characters, items or other features of those the Harry Potter franchise to clarify the usage.
The reason the Harry Potter franchise was chosen is simply because the initiator of this project knows it well and thinks many others do, too. Also note that there is even a petition for a Pokémon GO like app from fans for Harry Potter. This project could be a starting point to develop such an app as a community-driven open source project (given the right holders allow it).
There are three ways of contributing to this project:
- Ping people in the Gitter channel of this repo to get in touch live.
- Use GitHub issues to discuss a concept, or leave comments on existing issues.
- Fork this repo, do your changes and file a pull request to contribute changes.
Note that you may want to do either one or both of the first two steps before going on to step 3. This increases the chances that your pull request is going to be merged.
Important:
By contributing to this repository you agree that all content provided becomes part of this project and therefore the same license applies to the newly provided content as to all previous content. See the file LICENSE.txt for license details.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or open the file LICENSE.txt.
