Hunt game with Actionbound

English Support
#1

Hello all,

I must start with saying I have not tested Actionbound alot. So I might ask “stupid” questions - please forgive me.

I would like to use Actionbound for a hunting game. Let me explain and see what is possible:

  • players will all start at the same place. They open the app and see lots of places on the map they can go to. What places they visit, in what order, is their choice. For every place they visit, they get a certain amount of points.
  • only when they have collected a certain amount of points, the next stage is unlocked: now they get to see the final location they need to go to. At this location, they must take a picture and upload it.
  • while the players are playing this game, some hunters try to catch them. They don’t know what places the players can visit for points, until a place is visited, in that case, the location is revealed to them. This can be done manually by a game master, but what I need is the game master receives a message immediately when players get to a location.

Is this possible?
So what I need is:

  • a game with 2 stages for the players: stage 1 has multiple locations to visit, in random order, rewarding points. stage 2 is unlocked when the player has a certain amount of points and tells them to go to a certain location and upload a selfie on that location
  • whenever a location is visited, the game master receives a message with the location and what player got there.

Thanks in advance!
Joep

#2

Hi Joep,

don’t worry about asking questions, we’re happy to help.

You’re planning a very interesting hunt, unfortunately not everything you have planned will be doable with Actionbound.
Actionbound does not track players due to data protection laws.
It is also not possible to unlock stages based on collected points. But this is an interesting feature that we might develop in the future.

I hope you will still use Actionbound for your hunt. If there are still questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
Cheers
Lotta

#3

So, another idea to make this work:

I create a single bound for every location, with a qr-code. All these qr-codes are printed out on a map that the players receive. So when they want to go to a place, they scan the qr-code for that bound and go there. The game master can see this too, because that bound is completed when the location is reached.

The game master keeps scores for each team. Once a team has collected enough points, the game master sends them the link for the final bound, where the players must go to the final location and take a selfie.

It’s more work for me, but I guess there is no other way to do it, right?

#4

That might be a way to make it work. Right now I can’t think of another way.

#5

So… we finally played our Hunt game this weekend, and we had a lot of fun!

So here is what we did:
We had 2 groups of players: hunters and survivors. There were 11 teams of 3 or 4 survivors, and 7 hunters. We played in our city, survivors had to walk/run all the time, the hunters had bikes. The goal for the survivors was to score points with ActionBound, without being tagged out by the hunters. When the game started, the survivors gathered at a secret place, where they received a print out with 21 qr-codes, placed on a map. Each qr-code was for 1 ActionBound mission, containing 3 parts: go to a certain place (arrow & distance), take a selfie of your group at that spot, and a message saying they got 1 point. Each team was instructed to use the exact same teamname for every bound they played. We had our software to crawl all the result pages for these bounds, checking for new results. As a result was found, it was added to our database as a new visit, linked to a location and a team. All locations were also in the database (coordinates, name, ActionBound result page url) So far, this was used to get the visits into our system. With these results, we had a map of our city, initialy blank, where visits popped up 3 minutes after the bound was finished. This map was displayed on a screen in the center of the city, in a bar, visible from outside. So the hunters always came to this location, looking where survivors were active so they could go hunt them down. When a hunter tagged a survivor team, they took a selfie and sent that to us. In our software, we logged this TimeOut. From that moment, that survivor team was tagged out for 15 minutes. If a result was scraped from ActionBound, and the team was on TimeOut at the time that bound was finished, we deleted it from ActionBound automatically, so they did not score a point. On the map, we also showed a score board, where teams were displayed in red when they were on timeout, also displaying how long the timeout still lasted. The locations that had been visited, were also displayed on the map: in red if it had been visited in the last 8 minutes, orange for the last 15 minutes, black after that.
Once a team of survivors had reached a certain score (we played up to 15 points), we activated the final part of the game: the survivor team with 15 points received a new qr-code, for the Home location. This was a bound just like the others, find the spot and take a selfie. 3 minutes after the survivors received this qr-code, the Home location was displayed on the map, causing all the hunters to rush to that location too. In our case, the winning survivor team had just finished the final bound before the hunters arrived…

So what we developped is: database with locations, survivor teams, hunters, visits, a settings table. A cron job to crawl the result pages of all the locations in the database. A web page with the map and score board, a web page with scores only (so the survivors could monitor timeouts too), and admin page to log timeouts, activate home, enable or disable the cron job. We used 2 messenger groups, one for the hunters and one for the survivors, to share information, hunters used their group to send us the selfies when they tagged a survivor team. Prior to the game, the survivors did not know who was hunting them, and the hunters did not know the survivors. When a hunter tagged a survivor team for the first time, their picture was also sent to the survivors.

All players really enjoyed this game, but we noticed 1 problem: the results of a bound are only shown online when the user has finished all the steps in the app, not when the last part is completed. When players visited a location, took a selfie and then waited 10 minutes to finish the bound in the app, the result showed up online, we showed it on the map and it stated it was 10 minutes ago, having the hunters complain they were supposed to see it 3 minutes after completion… They only way this could be fixed, is by making the app upload a result automatically when a bound is completed, this could be made optional maybe? Then the result would be uploaded immediately when the last stage is completed, without manually having to click “send”.

Also, an API would be very cool! Now we had this cron job crawling for results, logging in every time, accessing the url for all results first. We probably caused unnecessary traffic to your server, sorry about that :slight_smile:

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#6

Hi Joep,

thanks for the great feedback. Your Bound sounds really fun. Did you share any of it on social media or is there some way, that we could share it? We’re always looking for creative ways to use Actionbound to inspire our users.

I’ll take your suggestions back to our programmers. However I can not promise if and when those changes can be made.

Cheers
Lotta

#7

Hi Lotta,

there was a post by one of our hunters, in Dutch. If you want me to, I can make a post in English so you can share it too. Question is, do you want me to share our own code too? I am absolutely willing to share it to anyone who wants to use it, but it can cause more traffic to your servers, when more people start crawling the result pages. Maybe you need to check first if the extra traffic we generated on friday evening would cause problems if more people did it? There was a post just today on the Belgian Scouts facebook group, about (free) apps used by scouts groups. I mentioned ActionBound as a great app there, so people might pick it up too :slight_smile:

Our code also requires some IT-knowledge for other people to use it… They need to set up a cron code, run a website in php, set up a database…

#8

Hi Lotta, can I publish our source code online? There is a risk that it will cause too much traffic to your servers if too many people use it…

#9

Hey Joep,
no need to share your code. I would rather use it as an example to use Actionbound in a creative way.
Maybe you can send me an email via lotta@actionbound.de an we can talk about details.

Cheers
Lotta

#10

Hello. This is a great idea :slight_smile: very creative. I would like to use it using Lasertag outdoors, anychance you could share your code with me privately ?

#11

What emailaddress can I reach you are? What laser tag gear do you use? I’m an LTTO / LTX / LTAR fan :slightly_smiling_face:

#12

My email is krish@verticalworldltd.com

We use intager system.

Im from mauritius :slight_smile: far far away island. Lol

What are your contact details

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