Orbster blogs

Walking with strangers

GPS Mission has a lot of active players, playing in more than 50 countries. But at this point of time, I am still the only one in my city. This seems to be a general problem of location-based gaming. Here is some thoughts on how to solve it.

Comparing Maps

To create a GPS Mission others can play, anyone can use the online GPS Mission Designer. By placing symbols on a digital map, checkpoints are generated, places players have to visit. As Jörn announced in the forum, the mission designer now offers a whole variety of maps to choose from. I think this can be extremely helpful, especially when designing offroad missions like e.g. the virtual mushrooms. It´s pretty amazing how different the same place (I chose a section of the Stadtwald in Karlsruhe) looks like on different maps (see below).

iPhone Testing

The GPS-Mission iPhone client is about to come!

Beta-phase winner visits the Oktoberfest

Our player VadimV sprinted up the high-score list in June and July, collecting the amazing amount of over 12,000 pieces of GPS Mission gold. This won him an all expenses paid trip to the Oktoberfest (including beer) together with his wife!

Creating great GPS Missions (remake)

The golden rules are: keep it short, keep it safe, test your mission & don't ask ambiguous questions. And obviously you should make it interesting and fun!

Future hunt completed

We were part of CScout’s MISSION FUTURE event at Ars Electronica. This is a short summary of our visit to Linz.

Ars Electronica live feed

As the first attendees of Mission Future have played our ars electronica Future Hunts, we proudly present the live feed from the venue. It can be found at

http://gpsmission.com/feeds/ars_electronica.kml

The missions present some of the open air exhibits that can be found near the Danube and the town main place. With the weather being great in Linz today, these are great strolls for the afternoon. If you are in the area, it is definitely worth a try, and you will even become part of our live feed!

Elebi7

Location-based and totally kawaii: find the elemental creatures that escaped from a secret laboratory in the black forest (of all places). Check out the Elebi7 site.