old ideas/projects lost in the darkness...

Hey folks,

i thought it would be nice idea to write a post about old ideas i had which vanished with time and i never really managed to bring them to life. I think most of us have some ideas which we would like to make real and we struggle because we dont know if we can do it or we just dont have the resources or experience.

For now i just want to tell you about my game idea i had around 2009/2010 or something. At this time i was at the beginning of my apprenticeship as developer.

I don't really know exactly how i came up with this idea but i always liked role playing games and final fantasy games. As well as many others i wanted to do my own awesome game so i started to try something with java but never come far.

I don't know how many times i tried it over and over again. Everytime with the new hope not to loose the passion for it due to problems. As soon i had a problem and i didnt know how to solve them i just switched to something else until i had a problem there. And everything started again. Everytime i tried it with different approach to make it easier for me to have progress and finish a part.

Here is screenshot of some attempts (while searching for images for this post i even found my old jar files :D ):

At that time i got my first smartphone which was HTC Hero with Android 1.6. A friend of mine started with android development and it sounded cool so i wanted to do it too.

With the possibility of having smartphones i thought a game for it would be awesome. As i was already trying to make a rpg why not do it for a smartphone which had also cool features like fetching the users location.
Then i came up with the idea for a "real life role playing game - rlrpg" which i used as working title.

The idea:

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Google map works as a "world map" with certain regions. Different regions have different mobs. You can set a place as "home camp". If you are at your "home camp" or nearby your health and mana replenish. At the moment you leave your "safe zone" which is a specific area around the "home camp" you enter the "adventure mode". You can disable the "adventure mode" if you don't want to play and dont be bothered by notification of an mob encounter. It works like random encounter. If you move there is a possibility that you encounter a mob which attacks you. Combat works as in any other game. You gain experience and items when fighing mobs. Shops etc. are defined places in real towns which you have to visit. (To make profit there would be a possibility to make "partnerships" with local shops/bars ) As you see i also was dreaming about $$$. There is an option which makes you visible for others. So you could also see people nearby by to trade items etc. You can also add a friend or form a party to fight together against stronger mobs. All basic stuff which is in other rpgs is also there like rare items and stuff.

I think thats about it. Can't remember more at the moment but that should be it.

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I wanted to combine location tracking and a game which nowadays is nothing new. Back then i didn't heard of something like this. I talked to my friend who already spent some time learning android development on his g1 smartphone. He told me that checking for the location uses much battery even with fixed intervals it would be very battery consuming...and so i stopped thinking further about my idea.

Few years later "Ingress" was released and people gone crazy and i thought "WTF!?". People have even bought themselves additional battery for their phone only for this game.

At this point i thought about my old idea and maybe what would happen if i somehow have managed to create that game. It would probably wouldn't be that big as "Ingress" but hey, i would have been the person who done it before it.

At this time i thought maybe its not too late if i just start again and just make it real and finish at least a basic prototype. From there it should be possible to improve on it.
I still wasn't experienced with android development but i tried it. And well, history repeats itself...
I had problems with errors i didnt know how to solve and this always made me stop working on it. So i thought i should a least make some screens to have a better plan.

I even had an application which showed me my position with basic info and also the position of my "home camp":

My problem was that i wanted to have something cool just from the start on. I haven't had a plan/roadmap or something which would helped me work focused on certain things. I wanted to have nearly everything and working asap. Combined with problems during development it was frustrating why i also stopped that time with the project.

As we know few years later "Pokemon Go" was released and i thought again "WTF!?"

So don't stop thinking big. Do it but start small. Step by step.
Its a long way to the top if you want to rock n' roll ;)
Even if you fail you will learn from it.
Maybe sometime in the future i will make that idea real to ease my mind.

Do you have also ideas/projects which you didnt make real and you still think of from time to time for some years?
These could be also experiences you want to make in life but you procrastinate it.