created by jambots.com
In order of steps ascending.
South Steps, Minnehaha Falls – 111 steps
Chestnut Street, Stillwater – 120 steps
Pioneer Park, Stillwater – 122 steps
Hidden Falls, Highland – 122 steps
WPA 1940, Minnehaha Falls – 133 steps
James Hill Mansion, Saint Paul – 137 steps
Science Museum of Minnesota – 145 steps
South Hill, Stillwater – 161 steps
Franklin and East River Road – 163 steps
Fulton, East Bank – 186 steps
Honorable mention to the North Steps and Picnic Ground 4 at Minnehaha with 102 steps each.
In Stillwater I logged 549 steps at 7 locations.
Pioneer Park
Library
Chestnut St.
South Hill
West Wing
Courthouse
Triangle Park
Also stumbled on brand new metal stairs off of Wheelock Parkway.
See the interactive map here: https://www.staircastle.com/app/list.html
I did not know there were 8 staircases totaling 252 steps in Powderhorn Park. I saw several groups of people climbing.
Also found a few stairs hidden away near the streetcar museum.
That completes the initial database for the Twin Cities with 103 locations totaling 3936 steps. I’ll break 4000 once I get out to Stillwater.
Check out the map here: https://www.staircastle.com/app/list.html
This is the tool I use to review locations in the StairCastle database.
Click to open map. Click a marker to see images and metadata.
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:
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 .
The last sprint is on! All I need to do is finish the leaderboard updater, challenge manage views, and checkin feedback queue. Look for the register link to go live this weekend.