Location based android game

During the early days of Covid-19 (before everyone was sent home), spurred-on by the popularity of Ingress and the Pokemon Go mobile games, I decided to write my own. I had been tinkering around with Unity and I knew it well enough to start to tinker around with things.

The first version of it was able to track my movement and I grabbed some sample data from Ingress to use as “portals” in the game.

I built a 5-node docker swarm cluster and built the entire back-end using docker containers. I had a staging environment and a production environment (even though I’m only a one-person dev team) but it was pretty good for testing new ideas without interrupting the current version of the game.

I ended up scraping all the Ingress portals in the whole game for the USA and importing them into my game.

This was the look of the ‘final’ product. I put it on the Google Play store for a couple of years and I managed to get a few dozen regular players and testers for me to bounce ideas off of. I moved the back-end into AWS and let it sit for a while.

In the end, I figured that I should take down the server to save money. After a few years, the user activity dropped off and I took the service offline and off the Play Store. :(