5 ms·
Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk
- hugh3 15y agoI'd love to see this done in South Central Los Angeles.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIt would be nice if they open-sourced it so people could make their own maps, teams, etc.
- shakes 15y agoI'm one of the developers who worked on the project. We actually have been discussing open sourcing the project for this reason. The biggest challenge is setting up the neighborhood constraints and getting the checkins to map correctly to those constraints. But it's on our radar, and we're open to any ideas people have.
- iambot 15y agoprovisional +1 for when you release the source on gitHub, looks like a brilliant idea though
- pavel_lishin 15y agoHonestly, you could probably even keep it closed-source, so long as people could design their own map overlays. I'm not sure how foursquare works for this - I actually tried to work with the API so my computer could send my girlfriend a text whenever she checked into a shoe store - but it seemed impossible.
- cbailey 15y agoIf you were trying to discourage your girlfriend from purchasing shoes, this method would probably only discourage your girlfriend from checking in to shoe stores.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoGranted; it was meant to be more of a humorous surprise for her. It also turned out to be much more of a challenge than I expected - there was no way to get a list of checkins for a friend, so I ended up setting up another account, friending her, and setting it to e-mail me whenever a friend checked in. The plan was to use Lamson to parse these e-mails, but apparently it depended on a library that - in a minor version upgrade - totally fucked everything that depended on it by arbitrarily renaming several functions. Unless you specifically installed fucktits version 2.2 - not 2.1, and god help you if you installed 2.3 - it wouldn't work. After three days, and help from a friend, I just tossed it all in the garbage and resigned myself to living under a pile of her shoes.
- slowernet 15y agoMay I ask where you sourced your neighborhood boundary KML? I could use this.
- cpeterso 15y agoOr go global!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hoprocker 15y agoDon't worry -- remember how craigslist used to only be for SF? You start your project static, then develop towards dynamicism. We'll be playing Fourcraft in Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and they may even get enough of a playerbase to really take it international (Africa has control of Minnesota!).
- pavel_lishin 15y agoAs a big risk and Langrab fan, this looks pretty awesome.
- edkennedy 15y agoThere's no real mention of how the game mechanics are integrated. It's not really risk if it's simply "the most checkins wins." No element of chance. Could still be early in the game however.
- shakes 15y agoWe're still tweaking game mechanics, but the general way it works right now is like this: - If you checkin and your borough already owns that neighborhood your checkin adds a defender to the neighborhood. - If you checkin and your borough doesn't own that neighborhood, your checkin counts as an attack. -For an attack we do a dice roll, and based on that dice roll you take out X number of defenders. If your checkin takes out all the defense then your borough now owns that neighborhood and you become a defender. As the user base increases we'll definitely be tweaking things, but the element of chance is huge to us. It's what keeps things interesting.
- edkennedy 15y agoThat sounds great. Thank you for explaining what was missing in the article.
- bproper 15y agoThe game hit 600 players this afternoon and the dev teams says they are planning to build new feature so users can see the real time soldier count as the check ins fly and the battles go down! http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your-check-in-action-into-global-domination/ http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your-chec...
- spobin 15y agoI'd be interested to know how you are using the Foursquare API to get check-ins. Are you just requesting user check-ins at regular intervals or is it cleverer than that?
- michaeldhopkins 15y agoVery clever. I'd like to see you re-enact Napoleon of Notting Hill using this system.
- johns 15y agoQONQR is doing something similar but with more than just checkins.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Jeema3000 15y agoAll hail the barbarian armies of the Waste Land!... :)
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI take it that's Jersey?
- gavingmiller 15y agoAnyone looking for a localized version of risk should definitely checkout Own This World: http://ownthisworld.com/ http://ownthisworld.com/ It works around the globe and it's quite fun. It actually changed how I travel about the city... pretty awesome. The devs are very active with it too (Edit: and they just hit 10k users.)
- Goronmon 15y agoHuh, no Android but Windows Phone and iPhone support. That's the first time I've seen that combo.
- gavingmiller 15y agoIIRC the developers do .NET for their day jobs, and Canada (where they're from) doesn't have the same Android penetration as the USA. But I agree, bizarre choice.
- brennancreative 15y agoAn Android version is being developed. The reason we went with WP7 before Android, was that a .NET developer friend wanted to try building something for the platform when it was announced. Seemed like a good fit to get in at launch.
- scelerat 15y agoTurf, an antecedent. http://www.smedresmania.com/turf/ http://www.smedresmania.com/turf/
- Shenglong 15y agoMaybe NYC gangs can start using Foursquare instead of guns to settle their turf wars. :)
- devindotcom 15y agoThis is something I've been meaning to mention to the FS developers for like a year now. All you need is to let people be members of teams and track team presence with some basic blob-based map overlays. People will quickly and naturally divide into Red and Blue, Jets and Sharks, North and South. It's possible they don't want to introduce that element, but I know it'd be fun as hell now that it's so popular in many urban locations.
- mkramlich 15y agoRead the description of the "game". So.... neither Risk or Warcraft or WOW. Foursquare is involved though, that's the only honest/accurate part.