Saturday, November 15, 2014

Selfie Challenges


This week, I got one of the features I've been really thinking about in place for the game: Selfie Challenges!


There are two ways to play Lone Spelunker.  You can have it just generate a random cave and you can explore it on your own.  And that's fun.

But you can also explore what I'm calling "Known Caves", which are basically caves with set seeds for generating the cave that everyone shares.  When you go into a known cave, you can post selfies you take to the cave's web page.  Those selfies are associated with your caver name and annotated with the room and the depth.

In the description of the cave, there is a list of "Selfie Challenges".  Basically, they're just challenges we lay out for you to try to achieve, such as "Take a selfie at the top of Pluto's Oasis."  If you manage to do that, you can post the selfie to the page for all to see!


I'm interested to hear what people think of this idea.  I think it will not only encourage exploration, but also will get people interested in trying to, say, be the first person to make it to the "Ebon Closet" or whatever.  Especially in cases where certain caverns are very difficult to reach or discover, these selfies that are shared with the rest of the community should be really interesting and prestigious.

3 comments:

  1. I like this idea, using seeds creates a metagame of finding really interesting/dangerous cave generation, which parallels the competitive nature of explorers in history and real life. You will have a race to find the deadliest/most convoluted caves, so It works on more than one level. Very cool.

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  2. Here's a suggestion for another challenge. Caves in our local area are well know for their fossil records, giving us insight into the natural history of Australia. Perhaps a challenge could be added to find fossils for a range of creatures in the games world?

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  3. One of the features already in the game is the ability to find fossils, actually! Currently, it's handled like any other "trove" (a special find in the game), but maybe I need to flesh that out a bit...

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