I just released my first fully free Android game: Wandering Alchemist (GPS walking game)

No plans yet, I might look into that in the future.

I'd rather focus on bringing it to iOS, having a few people who already asked for it. Not an Apple fan, so still thinking about getting an old used iPhone for testing..

Yes, sorry. I had to limit a handful of countries due to laws.

For example Japan forces you to register a business there.. similar to Vietnam. Russia has sanctions. And so on :-/

Ah, sorry, by default Google seems to inject some kind of Google Protection into new apps. You're the third person asking about F Droid, I'll have to take a look :)

I might need to do custom builds for that though (strip out Google plugins), I'll put it on my todo list.

Found it, Google injects by default an "Installer check" that blocks the app from running without Google Play.

I disabled it, try to get the newest version of the game (1.2.11) over Aurora and see if it runs :)

F Droid is a lot more messy, the game has to be 100% open source for it, which is not something I'm working on right now. I'd rather get it to iOS first.

Thank you 💚

But please only donate if you're rich. Otherwise just enjoy the game and if you want give feedback :)

Times are hard enough for everyone, I made the game in my freetime and have a job, so no worries!

Thanks 💚 Let me know what you think about it!

Just on Reddit, but it's a ghost town with zero interactions, lol.

I'm not really active on Twitter like sites, not my style unfortunately :-/

Lovely. If you run out of street map as you travel, just hit the map button again. It will hopefully offer you the download for the new area :)

Also, the app is not available in Russia,

it will be released as soon as you leave ukraine :D

tell putie. I'm sure he'll listen then.

Fully playable while traveling.

Stuff you put down is just decoration (so skip that for places you don't revisit) and currently two functional buildings (garden to plant ingredients, market stall to sell potions for less gold).

When traveling over 12 km/h it doesn't count for walk distance (companion rewards, daily missions, ..) but it's fully playable otherwise :)

It's fully offline, so no worries there. The GPS is just for your game to know where you are while playing. No ads, no data collected (besides what Google generally collects over the Play Store).

In theory there is one network connection to Cloudflare: I offer a street map download for all across the world. So for example if you're in Austria like me it looks up which map file you need (simple .json catalog), then offers you to download the map file once (57 MB for Austria). But I don't track anything there either.

Zero interest in handling player data, I'm in the EU, GDPR is a bitch :)

Darn, were you on the latest version? I did improve the GPS with update 1.2.10 (as it sometimes had trouble getting a location fix on resuming the game).

I did want to add rotation to the map, but unfortunately with the art style it's just not possible :-/ If I just had roads and flat terrain then sure, but with the procedural terrain you can't really rotate it. Or if you only rotate the street map and not the terrain it would look terrible (in my opinion) and not like an actual world map. Open to suggestions though!

For now I removed the Google Play store protection, so you can download it over Aurora (Starting with version 1.2.11).

F-Droid won't happen for a while, as the game would need to be 100% open source for it, sorry!

Thank you 💚

I still need to get a used iPhone to look into iOS releases (:

Map data is from OpenStreetMap, then heavily cut down and compressed so people don't have to download so much.

Edit: Wait, forgot about the main topic, what phone does your husband have? There shouldn't be any restriction on Android version (if it's one of the newer ones), but maybe I really messed up somewhere.

Yes, the map only has zoom for now (pinch in and out). As it's a fantasy world I didn't want to provide too much "looking around" options, the only thing that has to do with the real world is the street maps, which is an optional download ^^'

A little bit concerned people will do stupid things like go into private property, if I give too much freedom there. But I'll think about adding a two finger move or something, the big question is just how to recenter again afterwards (button? There already is a double tap to reset zoom).

The water dragging might just be bad design, there are some tricks to it, but I'm not fully happy with the minigame.

For the fire, big movements :)

Let me know if it actually works from Aurora. I had to strip out the Google protections so it doesn't crash on launch (:

Thank you :)

Ground shadows for which part?

There's procedural terrain (fully code generated) for the map. And then there's the decorations/buildings you can place (low poly assets).

Originally I wanted to generate all art by code, like your character could pick clothing, eyes, nose, mouth, hair, ... but I just couldn't get it to look good enough (unfortunately, I thought it would be really cool).

I'm a software developer, not an artist. I can do design work and draw a little, but not good enough. So I used a local image generation model on my GPU, generating each asset dozens of times and then reworking the best one in GIMP until satisfied.

For the light effects I drew a greyscale map on another layer, which then gets added to the asset at night (colored in with the color the player picked).

I'd love to hire an artist to redraw everything in a better style, but that's simply not in my budget. Maybe if the game actually makes some money, which is unlikely ^^'

Yes, pretty much. There are some harvest minigames for collecting.

You also find various events. With the ingredients you brew potions, sell them and then spend the money you earn :)