It took quite a while, but it’s finally out. Fully free, no ads, no in-app purchases (besides a “Support the developer” option), no data collection and fully offline playable. All you need is your phone and GPS :)
I originally made the game to go on walks, unfortunately I sat even more in front of my PC to develop it. It is what it is. Hopefully it motivates some of you to get your steps in 💚
General idea of the game: Collect ingredients, brew them into potions and sell them to merchants. With the gold and reputation you get you can buy things and decorate your neighborhood. Other players see the same map and resources (so you can indirectly play together), but the game world fully belongs to you (singleplayer only).
General roadmap right now:
- Adding achievements
- Adding buildings you can improve over time (tavern to attract merchants and an ingredient tree you need to grow)
- More minigames and improving the existing ones
- And of course bugfixes, please let me know if you run into issues :)
For any questions and suggestions I’m always available!
Interesting bro
This looks great! I’m downloading it on Aurora rn, but if an f-droid version comes out I’ll be very excited!
Let me know if it actually works from Aurora. I had to strip out the Google protections so it doesn’t crash on launch (:
Please make F-Droid version happens.
For now I removed the Google Play store protection, so you can download it over Aurora (Starting with version 1.2.11).
F-Droid won’t happen for a while, as the game would need to be 100% open source for it, sorry!
I have tried it. So far, I had to open the Google Maps app while the app is open so it will exit “Waiting for GPS.” Maybe for it to trigger the location service. Also, I think the map will be friendlier if it can be rotated based on the compass or manual rotation by pinch. The current setup would be fine only if you are already familiar with the roads in the area. But, for a free app, I like that there is an alternative i can use for Pokemon Go or Ingress.
Darn, were you on the latest version? I did improve the GPS with update 1.2.10 (as it sometimes had trouble getting a location fix on resuming the game).
I did want to add rotation to the map, but unfortunately with the art style it’s just not possible :-/ If I just had roads and flat terrain then sure, but with the procedural terrain you can’t really rotate it. Or if you only rotate the street map and not the terrain it would look terrible (in my opinion) and not like an actual world map. Open to suggestions though!
I did want to add rotation to the map, but unfortunately with the art style it’s just not possible :-/
Just for the record, another GPS game, “Resources”, also never implemented a rotating map; possible for similar reasons.
I guess Google play hasn’t served me the latest version yet. I will wait for it and try again. I am on version 1.2.11
Sorry, that’s the latest, I fat fingered the version (:
Was this on just your very first app start (with the tutorial) or later on too? The first start needs a very good location fix, sub 50 meters (so indoors it’s a bit tough), otherwise the tutorial spawns, you jump and it becomes a mess.
As soon as the tutorial is done all further game starts should be much faster, hopefully.
It was on my very first start. I tried closing then opening the app but it didn’t fix the issue. I know opening Google Maps will fix this because this also happens on Pokemon Go when the GPS location is inaccurate. Opening Google Maps seems to trigger a better algorithm for GPS. Not sure if this is device specific though or due to power saving mode.
GPS can be fiddly unfortunately. But great that it works now, if you get any issues on the next few starts please let me know 💚
I see a couple people asking for an F-Droid release which would be great, but would require the app to be open source. Just thought I’d let you know there’s no obligation for you to open-source your app if you dont want to. If you’d rather keep it closed source that’s okay too
By GPS enabled, does that mean this is like my fit bit and I can level up through masturbating rigorously? Asking for a friend.
we shall watch your career with great interest
I downloaded the game and got my city’s street map added. Now I really want to test it… hopefully the dense smoke goes away before summer ends 😢
Looks awesome, I look forward to trying it!
Interesting concept and I wanted to try it. Downloaded from Aurora (because my phone is degooglized) and was kicked out of the game upon launch because google play isn’t enabled… Disappointing and I’d love to have it on F Droid too
Found it, Google injects by default an “Installer check” that blocks the app from running without Google Play.
I disabled it, try to get the newest version of the game (1.2.11) over Aurora and see if it runs :)
F Droid is a lot more messy, the game has to be 100% open source for it, which is not something I’m working on right now. I’d rather get it to iOS first.
Wow that automatic installer check is really shitty from Google, I wonder why I never saw outrage about that, it will close access to most apps in degoogled operating systems
What’s the problem with 100% open-sourcing? Third party libraries?
Ah, sorry, by default Google seems to inject some kind of Google Protection into new apps. You’re the third person asking about F Droid, I’ll have to take a look :)
I might need to do custom builds for that though (strip out Google plugins), I’ll put it on my todo list.
+1 for f-droid pls :)
Looks cute. I like the art style.
Ya gonna open source it and put it on fdroid?
No plans yet, I might look into that in the future.
I’d rather focus on bringing it to iOS, having a few people who already asked for it. Not an Apple fan, so still thinking about getting an old used iPhone for testing…
You can probably emulate iOS in xcode but you are unlikely to build anything for it without MacOS and xcode. Yeah, lovely environment.
Yes, you need a Mac for XCode (can’t emulate that). Then you also need to pay Apple $99 a year, even if you just want to release a free app.
I could simulate an iPhone for testing, but for a GPS game this would be messy. Even on Android I’m still struggling a bit with getting GPS to work reliably. You pretty much need a real phone to test that :-/
If you can’t afford or don’t want to buy a used Mac for this, I recently set up MacOS 26 on a Thinkpad t480s I had lying around. Turns out if you just google specific laptop model + hackintosh, you’ll easily find out if it’s a well supported model for hackintosh.
However whether or not this would work on a brand new Apple account or you’d just get banned for suspicious activity, I have no idea. My account is old and I have an iPhone, so it wasn’t as suspicious to them I think.
No worries there, I already got a MacBook Air recently (As I needed something portable + for work), so I have that covered. Just ordered a used iPhone SE 2020, that will still get the newest iOS version, so it should do well enough for a few tests :)
One other thought: I believe that it’s possible to run macOS in a VM in Linux. The macOS license technically doesn’t allow that, and I also don’t know if that would be sufficient for running XCode or for publishing to the App Store. I’ve never tried any of that myself, but have heard that at least running it in a VM is possible.
You can also run Hackintosh if you have a AMD gpu or older Intel integrated graphics
Yes, that’s another option.
Xcode actually has pretty good gps emulation, you can set routes for it to walk.
What tech is this using? Is it a html5 game?
Oh, it’s Godot.
I know you can simulate GPS, but it’s way too clean and predictable. With a real phone you get much weirder behavior. Besides the whole permission topic on real devices.
One player complained about GPS jumping 100 meters away, but their Google Maps had the same issue. So I had to say “I can’t do it better than Google Maps” :D
Ah okay! I’ve been wanting to make this style of app using webxdc for a long time
Oh, it’s Godot.
fantastic work
But I had to use Godot Mono (with C#). GDScript was way too slow. Especially for the procedural terrain generation.
Oh right, forgot the GPS, welp.
have done game dev on ios… man it’s so much easier on android. objective c and the app store are gigantic pains in the ass. you’ll probably also need to get a macbook or other apple device to build from.
Do you still have to use Objective C? They’ve been trying to get everyone to use Swift for nearly a decade now and Swift is a MUCH nicer language, but I have no idea about game dev in particular, since I’ve only done crappy little apps.
I’m outside the macos ecosystem. so probably?
Eh, did some research and it turns out you have no need for Objective C using any of the mainstream game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) and in general you only need it when working with old frameworks. I’d wager that pretty much anyone who started iOS dev in the last 5 years hasn’t even touched objective C except when working on legacy apps.
I’m using Godot, so seemingly it could be as easy as export to XCode and build. Seemingly…
Let’s see, still in the process of sourcing a cheap iPhone SE 2020 or 2022. Everyone I know uses Android, so I can’t ask them if they have an old iPhone lying around (:
I wish ye luck! please do an after-action-review on how that goes, it’s good information for fellow devs
Looks great, thank you for developing it and for releasing it for free without catches! I hope that you will eventually release it for iOS.
Have you posted this to Mastodon or any other social media yet? I hope that word will spread and make your game popular. :)
Just on Reddit, but it’s a ghost town with zero interactions, lol.
I’m not really active on Twitter like sites, not my style unfortunately :-/
No problem, I understand. I’ll see what I can do to spread the word.
You may want to consider cross-posting this to some other communities on Lemmy though, like !freegames@lemmy.ml and perhaps !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml since this is a pretty interesting use of OSM data. Thanks again.
Will do, thank you!
Thank you!
Seconding the F-Droid request.
Also, the app is not available in Russia, is that by design?
In any case, good luck with it and thanks for sharing something like this!
Yes, sorry. I had to limit a handful of countries due to laws.
For example Japan forces you to register a business there… similar to Vietnam. Russia has sanctions. And so on :-/
I see! This is understandable for a small indie dev.
But I’ll always be happy to see other avenues for distribution :)
It’s on Aurora now, so that should work :)
Aurora causes weird issues for me, and also the anonymous access seems to be no more for everyone, so doesn’t help me in particular.
But I’m one user, and overall, having it on Aurora means a lot! Besides, having it there means someone eventually shares the .apk itself, and that’s something I can certainly work with, even if I’ll have to update manually.
Overall, a good development! :)
I honestly have no clue about APK sites, but some already picked up the latest version: https://apkcombo.com/wandering-alchemist/com.vlyn.wanderingalchemist/
I don’t have a degoogled phone, so I can’t test if it runs, sorry.
That’s some very obscure place to take apks from, but ultimately it works, thanks :D
Love the harvesting minigames!
Lovely, have fun! 💚
Just read your comments about OSM data etc. Fantastic! Well done.
About to head on holiday to Europe, so have downloaded it and will play as I go.
Thank you!
Lovely. If you run out of street map as you travel, just hit the map button again. It will hopefully offer you the download for the new area :)
Great tip! Thank you
This is so cool and I immediately downloaded it. I look forward to trying it out and dontaing to you! I rather my money go to a donation than a store. Thanks for sharing and developing!
Thank you 💚
But please only donate if you’re rich. Otherwise just enjoy the game and if you want give feedback :)
Times are hard enough for everyone, I made the game in my freetime and have a job, so no worries!
