Release B Available!

Release B fixes a lot of the roughest edges found in Release A, plus a feature I felt was important enough to add as a demonstration of the app's database.  This does not expand the scope of the prototype any; there are no additional missions or such. Scan Explorer will let you see how many places are near you, and what kind of places the game knows about. For actual gameplay purposes, there's a compass now that lets you see which direction you're facing to help navigate between close places.

Unless some reports of major issues show up, Release C of a prototype is either far off or unnecessary. The map data used is approaching a full year old, but this should have little impact on this particular data set. There aren't any other core features to show off that I can think of. I might shift towards building out a full game on top of this, or possibly taking a short break from locative stuff to work on other small projects before coming back to this one.  But I think this accomplishes the goal of demonstrating that you can do more with a location-based game than "pick up items from memorial benches and catch critters".

FULL CHANGELOG:

• A landing screen has been added for better first-run behavior
  • GPS permissions are no longer asked for immediately on application start. Instead, the landing screen has a button the user must press to ask for them.This only needs to be done once, and the landing page will be skipped in the future.
  • OSM and ODbL legal information is now displayed in-game on the landing screen instead of only on the itch.io download page.
• Main screen now displays your heading on a visible compass.
• A help menu with some deeper explanations of stuff than the tutorial provides is available now in the main header.
• Scanning for places is improved
  • Now always scans your current map tile, and it’s 8 surrounding tiles.
  • For far-away places, starts scanning a 3 tile radius away and continues until a place is found, then finishes at that radius and picks 1 place from the results
    • EX: if the closest museum is 5 tiles north-east, and there are 12 others 5 tiles south of you, it used to stop on that first one. Now, it’ll scan all tiles 5 away from your current tile and pick among the 13 available museums found at that distance.
• Scan Explorer screen added. This is partially for debugging purposes, partially to help you discover your area on your own. 
  • Click “Get Area Info” to see the results based in your current map tile (6-digit PlusCode)
  • Tap “Sub-Places” to limit it to places that have a parent entry
  • Tap “Far-scan” to see the result set for a distance trip (at least 3 map-tiles away) instead of your local area
  • OR: set a specific distance to see results for scanning all tiles X away from you. 0-1 is the same behavior the prototype uses to scan for places when picking the initial mission. This will not work if Far-scan is also on, as that takes priority
  • Set  the “Find Type” dropdown to filter results to only entries of a specific type, like “park” or “library”
  • By default, places you’ve been to before are not included. Tap “Include Visited” to override that behavior
  • The options from the Options screen is used here too, so if you’ve unchecked a particular category they’ll be removed from results here too
  • Can be closed with the Back button.
• The “View Area” map now indicates the size of the area covered, and scales the results to match proportionally.
• “Never Show This Place Again” button now works as expected
  • Managing your ignored places list isn’t a thing this prototype will handle. If you really, really need to clear it out, you’ll have to clear all the app data.
• “Pick New Place” now saves the change, instead of reverting back when the game is closed.
• A bunch of behind-the-scenes cleanup that doesn’t have much visible impact on the game.