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I originally made the game to go on walks, unfortunately I sat even more in front of my PC to develop it.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!
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
fantastic work
But I had to use Godot Mono (with C#). GDScript was way too slow. Especially for the procedural terrain generation.
interesting! I haven’t built anything for ios since unity back in 2019…
I wonder why it’s so slow?
Ah okay! I’ve been wanting to make this style of app using webxdc for a long time
Oh right, forgot the GPS, welp.