Design then build.
The scoring is designed to promote exercise every week by rewarding consistent effort with bonuses for collaborating on challenges. Visually I wanted to render the players’ neighborhood as a table-top game board with minimalist castles marking the play locations. Lots of reward sounds and contextual guidance is meant to keep the player engaged in defending their kingdom and its increasing revenue. I removed the mechanic of teams competing at locations to keep the focus on the players own accomplishments.
I’ve played and programmed adventure games since the Atari 800. I’ve been experimenting with 3D castles in Three.js off and on for a year. I finalized the design and started this build six weeks ago. The full sequence was:
- Game Design
- User Experience Design
- Interaction Design
- Graphic Design
- Information Architecture
- Business Logic
- Location and Reverse Geocoding
- Static Maps API
- 3D UI algorithm
- 2D Responsive UI
- AJAX, PHP, mySQLi PDO
The front end is JavaScript and three.js. The stack is wLAMP. Google provides tiles and location metadata. The actual first thing I did after getting the domain and installing WordPress was to open phpmyadmin and create a table called ‘locations’.
The database now has 75 locations totaling over 3000 stairs. The biggest are at Minnehaha Falls, there are many staircases around the river in Minneapolis, and the Summit area has a lot of steps including the James Hill Mansion .