I was introduced to Parallel Kingdom today in discussing mobile applications with a few friends. It’s a role-playing game designed for cellphone users that you can play on the iPhone or Android.
The gameplay is what you’d expect: killing dragons, teaming up against enemies, upgrading weapons. What’s different is that the environment is a Google Map that surrounds your current location by a few blocks, so you can only see other players that are nearby in the real world, and finding other monsters to battle means physically moving to a new location. The result is a combination of straightforward video game play combined with the fun of discovery found in geocaching.
This is a good start, but I’m curious what additional elements location awareness will bring to the mobile gaming experience. For the cellphone-owning gamers out there: what’s on your wish list?
8 thoughts on “Location-based gaming”
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“Parallel Kingdom can only be played in the United States.”
Sigh. What is it about Geolocation aware apps that they are almost never built to be world wide from day one?
I see your comments system still sucks. Please fix it.
You could implement reading of barcodes, or perhaps image recognition of other items (certain car makes/models etc). That way you could find/purchase items t o give you powers, upgrades health and so on. Put a xx minutes delay on each, so that one cannot scan the same hitem a dozen times at once.