Localio

A game about where you aren't in development

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I discovered at the tail end of 2025 that Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed accelerometer support back in 2019 for mobile safari. This basically killed WebXR. There’s no way to ask the user for special permission; it’s just flat out not allowed anymore. This is a real bummer because the tech had seemed to be ripe finally. About a year ago I tried an Apple Vision Pro and it was optically impressive but I wasn’t allowed to try anything beyond the on-rails demo.

WebXR still seems to be alive but only if you own an Occulus headset or build a native application. If I ever want to get Localio out into the world, I fear it may be forced to run on a device that is only supported for a few years. I’m including iPhones in that category by the way. I saw a lot of the games I enjoyed on iOS get zero backwards compatibility love with newer iOS versions which seems like such a sleazy way to make developers keep paying the license fee. I do understand that unsupported software can be considered dead to some people but I was a console kid where software on a cartridge or disc runs forever long after the developers have moved on.

That said, the accelerometer was only necessary for the first person view. Even after all these years I still don’t know what this game really is but I do know its main focus was geolocation data not necessarily augmented reality stuff. After 16 years of waffling it might be time to either put the idea to rest or spin up a little thing that’s close enough.

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What's this game about? I don't know. Except I do. Except I don't..? Whoa.

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Got sucked into blackbox again

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three.ar.js - A helper three.js library for building AR web experiences that run in WebARonARKit and WebARonARCore

Augmented Reality is a thing now. Right right now.

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An Exquisite Corpse

Last night I was invited to an exquisite corpse. Even with only two people, it can be a rewarding experience. Instead of second guessing the next step, words are forced out and explode into action. Each turn is an opportunity to glace towards something nearby, small, insignificant, only to see it manifest meaning later. I'm looking forward to the next one.

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To hear this music you have to be there. Literally

In this lovely talk, TED Fellow Ryan Holladay shares his experiment with "location-aware music." This programming and musical feat involves hundreds of geotagged segments of sounds that only play when a listener is physically nearby, creating a magical sense of presence.

Everything about geolocation mixed with interactive art is there. Except this one thing...

“We’re sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can’t travel to the United States but would like to hear this record. Well, unlike a normal album, we haven’t been able to accommodate this request.”

And that’s why I still want to make Localio. Because as cool of of an idea the Holladay Brothers’ idea may be, talking like that makes them sound like assholes.

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Territory

Territory is a bold adventure into the world of maps and prose. It is brave in a way that I have never known how to be. Localio, for the past 5+ years, has been a backburner project because I have struggled seeing any connection between its core concept of personal cartography and any meaningful story that a reader could engage with.

{a KEY has been added to your inventory}

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RICOH THETA

You can capture your entire surroundings with the simple press of the shutter button. Enjoy a new world of images you have never experienced before.

360 video cameras are decent and affordable now. So... That’s a thing.

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I Didn’t Preconceive Pokémon GO

A few folks have spoken to me recently about Pokémon GO, and asked me if I was upset that Niantic beat me to the punch. Answer: No. The concept for Localio was always radically different. I've been thinking on the game mechanic for such a long time because I wanted to solve one of the biggest problems that location-based games face: the fact that if you live far away from a big city, it's guaranteed that you'll never reach the top of a leaderboard. In Localio, you have to provide your own locations to travel to, as long as the geofences don't overlap, (and as long as you were within bounds that your parents set if you were under-age). Jack's "park" might be in his back yard in Switzerland, and Jill's "park" might be in her back yard in Australia. And they could leave things for each other as if the two back yards were the same place. My design also fixed an issue for smaller independent games: the fact that without a AAA coat of paint like the Pokémon franchise, an Ingress-like game launched by even a somewhat reputable company would fail because players would never find each others' landmarks. I've watched many try and fail: Open Caching, Groundspeak's Whereigo, a project that lost in Amnesia Fortnight, and a scrapped location-based game from Media Molecule. And given that I started coding in 2010, I do wish I'd actually made a game by this point. But perhaps all this hype about Pokémon GO means that the world is ready for this sort of thing in the indie game space.

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Stranded was at Indie Bits 2016. And it went pretty darn well! We are extremely tired. And ready to take a break. I think we managed to make a heck of a game. It bridged tons of genres, and had a coherent story. I'm proud of that!

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STRANDED is 99% done. There’s just a couple of loose ends to tie up. We hope to see you at Indie Bits this week. To start playing, find 1216 Taylor St.

While you wait, take a look at these calming alien bugs...

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STRANDED at Indie Bits 2016

If you’re just joining this blog, I understand that it would be pretty difficult to follow because it’s shifted away from Localio, a game project I started in 2012, and instead shifted to a new game called STRANDED.

I just received an official email that states that the game has been accepted to Indie Bits 2016.

So it’s a great time to talk officially about what STRANDED is. First, it’s not Localio, but it is using a bunch of little parts that were previously part of Localio. It’s a smaller spin-off project that I’m hoping will help me making the much bigger game later down the road.

So, anyway! STRANDED is a game about two space-explorers. You’re one of them. The other is your dad. You’re on an alien planet immediately after making an unexpected change in course that used up more fuel than planned. So you have to look for resources to refuel, and hopefully not bump into anyone else, and hopefully not run out of oxygen, and hopefully not lose radio signal... I don’t want to spoil much, but I’m pretty sure that we’re going to hype the game up with images of a non-playable character we’re just calling “The Peddler”. He’s an old drifter selling and buying space trash to anyone who will come by (in the form of an arcade game cabinet.) In return for some of your resources, you’ll get a weird vintage Russian GPS (which runs on your phone). The cabinet and the phone’s interactions become quickly intertwined, and will send the player all over downtown Columbia. It’s going to be rad, and kind of in the spirit of its predecessor, Metal Gear Geo.

So come on down to Indie Bits and play my game!

Lastly, all STRANDED posts will get tagged with #STRANDED.

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Denise at Lowes making last minute adjustments to our game cabinet's measurements.

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I'm not sure why I didn't make the connection before.

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Using the illustration above, I’ve tried improving upon rough sketches of the communicator by piping it through a neural network to help with figuring out aesthetics and how to change the shading. I could have just as easily rendered the whole thing out in 3D, but part of the fun of this project is trying out new methods.