This was a fun project that gave me the opportunity to develop an application for a mobile device, which was to be based around the Plymouth University campus. This naturally suggested some sort of GPS thing, and I came up with the idea of a photo-based treasure trail game in which the user is shown a sequence of images of various places on the campus, with the next one only being shown when you actually go to the place depicted in the previous photo. I was able to rent out an iPAQ PDA device, but was a bit lost with what to do on it, until I found a little program called MediaScape. It's a bit limited in what it can present but it essentially does all the hard work for you regarding working with GPS signals to get your location on a map, and trigger events when you enter certain areas. Fortunately it integrates very well with Flash, so I was quickly developing a fairly complex application built on communications between the two.

I eventually decided that the basic game needed some sort of story context, which is where the seagull came from. You take the role of a student handing in their coursework, only to have it stolen by a mischievous seagull! You have a time limit to locate the seagull by identifying the place depicted in the photo that is shown. As you get closer, the green-yellow-red radar goes off until you reach the spot, and then he flies away to the next place. There are easy, normal and hard modes, in which the obscurity of the photos varies and each has a string of ten photos before the game ends.

The photos selection system is the clever part, calculated in flash using a 2D array of coordinates. There are actually fifteen different photos per difficulty mode, and each is selected at random, but only if it falls below a certain maximum, and above a certain minimum radius of the location for the last photo. This prevents you having to travel too far in easy mode, or not far enough in hard mode!