Happy to answer any questions about the process, not just trying to sell my game.
I wanted something that was like Pokemon, but using real animals and in the real world. The aim of the game is twofold: get people out into nature & get them appreciating wild animals.
I've been playing with my friends and family and it's already fulfilling my aim!
You start off with a couple nets and healing potions (for the animals) and have to physically go out into natural areas, e.g. parks, woods, lakes etc, to photo and catch real wild animals. Once photo'ed, you can throw a net to capture them and once you have your first animal you can battle the wild animals to level up your own, which increases their stats, teaches them new moves and evolves them (yes, just like Pokemon). For example, a caterpillar will evolve into a chrysalis, then butterfly. You can also catch any evolution stage directly.
I came up with a clever way to have a progression system, the further you are from human areas, e.g. residential, industrial etc, the higher level the animals are. Once you get like 1 km away from built-up areas you need to battle the animals down first before you capture them. It's not easy!
I wanted health centres and shops to be well distributed throughout the real world, so I came up with using places of worship (churches, temples, mosques etc) and using real world grocery stores as in-game stores. You have to physically walk to one to buy your items and heal your animals!
If you're going out on a walk, you need to actually stock up on nets, potions etc. So, the game is not super easy, but I think that's what makes it fun and there's not a lot you can do in game from within your home, you have to physically get out in nature.
The currency is leaves, which you get for discovering, battling and capturing animals. If you're the first person in the world to discover an animal (very likely at the moment!) you get a bonus as well. Also, I use an official endangered species list, so more endangered animals give more leaves when you capture them etc. Each animal has it's full taxonomy listed within the game, so in your "Dex" you can see all the species from the different branches of the animal kingdom that you've caught.
On top of this, where available, I have the real animal's call within the game, which I think is kinda fun.
PvP: you can add friends and either trade or battle with them. Trading helps you fill out your Animal kingdom and improve your team. Battling awards leaves from the losing player to the winner!
As well as this, other cool stuff:
- it obviously uses a map of the real world, but it also has real-time accurate building shadows based on your Lat Long and the position of the sun, time of year etc.
- has live real world weather in the game, e.g. cloudy, raining, snowing, wind.
The game is procedurally generated based off a real world map, so the first time any player visits a new location, I quickly fetch the map data and render our game world on top of it (would be too expensive to render the entire globe ahead of time).
For AI people: I generate the animal moveset, evolution chain and sprite images in real-time the first time a species is discovered by any player. This takes ~10 seconds, during which I just say "Researching" within the game. So, it is possible to generate game assets on the fly, I haven't seen anyone else do this.
It's available on Android as well, but I need your Google email as it's in closed testing until I get 12 players using it for 2 weeks.
You just buy the game once and you can play it forever, no in-app purchases, I don't sell your data or advertise anything. I just wanted a simple game that people can play.