An open letter: The world in which I came up with Ingress or you still nobody will believe

Habrachitatel! I wrote about a dozen drafts and titles for this post. I waited a month, so that the burning desire to “write all-and-now” did not turn this record into a stream of disconnected thoughts without beginning or end. I read all the references to the subject of my story. I read all the comments on these posts. Why all this? It's simple. The fact is that in a certain way, I came up with the concept of the game in Ingress.





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So what happened?

No, the insight did not come to me, I didn’t see the signs, and of course I’m not preparing a lawsuit against Google for violating my copyright. The situation is much more interesting. During the whole of 2012, I was thinking about the concept of the game with which I was going to go to Kickstarter. And everything stopped at the moment when I started reading a note about Ingress.

On November 16, after lunch, reading an article about the release of a mobile game from Google, I seriously doubted that I was conscious and did not sleep. I will note that the attempts to “wake up” looked quite funny, and I’ve probably finally moved away from the “shock” just now.

What game did I come up with and what does it have to do with Ingress?

The game was conceived as a geospatial, mobile, cross-platform, with the possibility of limited control through the browser. Through the browser for the player is available "global mode", a map of the world. Game sectors are divided by country, the game space is land.



Story and preparation for the promo video: The near future, presumably 2022. Students of the University of Massachusetts in the framework of the master's project construct a "scanner" of radiation (it looks like a futuristic thermal imager). Suddenly, pointing the scanner to a window, they discover giant “streaks of light” in the form of hexagons over the city. Approximately the center of each hexagon (and at its corners) are sources of radiation on the surface (columns of light).



Without advertising their discovery, thanks to the connections of their supervisor, they send a prototype scanner to a freshly open lunar base (similar to the international space station on the moon, science campus). Images of the Earth’s surface from the Moon show the presence of “hexagons” over all inhabited areas.



Suddenly, all information about this coming from the Moon to the Earth is not perceived by the operators, is completely ignored. The rest of the information is processed by people as usual. It becomes clear that the consciousness of people around the world who are inside areas with hexagons (with the exception of a small percentage of unresponsive) is controlled by unknowns, blocking all information about the mysterious radiation.



Thus, the Lunar City becomes an outpost of the fight against unknown invaders. The player who downloaded the application and / or visited the site of the game, can get acquainted with the site / information "Moon base" where it is informed about the current situation and recruited into the ranks of one game force - "Resistance".



The working title of the game: “Moon 2022: Battle for the Earth. % name of the country of the player% ". At the same time, the player is given a choice - he can go to the side of the “Peacekeepers”, who claim that all the resistance players and the Lunar base are “extremists” and destroy the sources of “useful radiation” that suppress the aggression of most people and deter them from participating in world wars. .



The gaming sides have diametrically opposed goals - either to destroy the “hexagon of energy” by increasing the percentage of the population that will be “susceptible” to the incessant radio / television / Internet broadcasts of the Resistance Lunar Base or to restore the energy supply to the control zones, increasing the percentage of the “peace-loving” population.



Gameplay involves "visiting" areas under the "borders" of the energy hexagon, in order to explore the location of the energy source. For exploration with a certain regularity, points are awarded, in the corners / center of the zone - either joint actions of the players are necessary (visits with a certain regularity, mass visits), as well as the complication of the liberation of the zone if it is adjacent to the "captured" areas. When viewing the “global map”, a map of countries with selected “key zones” was provided, for the release / seizure of which special advantages were accrued (simplification of visiting tasks, a higher percentage of susceptibility of the population). I don’t even remember the banal “system of levels and experience”. Just like in "real games".



I could supplement the retelling of the concept with a lot of details, but I think that even such a “short squeeze” will be enough. I wanted to use OpenStreetMaps or GoogleMaps as a cartographic base, the player’s “field of view” limitations, the “Starcraft menu-style” theme - all these details, up to the hexagon in the Ingress logo, coincide with my idea much more than I could describe .

So what? You're crazy, your game is not at all like Ingress! What did you do to implement your idea?

I understand what an incredible coincidence is and that everyone who read science fiction is able to come up with a simple plot like Ingress or “The Moon 2022” (which is no longer destined to be born).



What did I do to implement my idea? In fact, nothing. I spent a week reading articles about financing game projects on Kickstarter, read an entertaining forum about finding investors for mobile games in the CIS, and even wrote a few personal messages on Habrahabr — developers of successful web games. Short summary: "You will need a lot of money." Oh yeah, and almost the whole year I enthusiastically consoled myself with hopes that this was a great idea and surely it would be interesting to people.

Why did you even write all this ?!

Reader! Do you believe that ideas are worthless? So, please do not believe.



Otherwise, one day you will wake up without a dream, which is realized by the next “Corporation of Good”.



They will do everything well, they will do better than you, they will do everything without you.



Do not repeat my mistakes. Act! And thanks for reading.