u/AchillesFirstStand

Built with threeJS, took about an hour. Also used Stripe's globe tutorial for reference.

I generated the dot grid globe, with black dots representing land masses. Then I coloured all search locations, based on user's IP addresses, using my brand colour.

Then for searches targeting a specific location, e.g. a New York based user searching in Spain, I created a line that flies from the user to the search location.

I'll put a link in the comments. If you do a search, your location will show up on the globe, pretty neat :)

Did it using threeJS, took about an hour with Claude Code.

I have built the following:

• Carbon Footprint Tracker - it uses an LLM to estimate the carbon footprint of items based on your country. It's a quick workaround compared to integrating official databases.
• WhatsApp Storytelling Coach - it's a chatbot with daily lessons to coach users into writing small stories to use in market content etc
• Animal Catching game - it's like Pokémon, but you capture, train and battle wild animals. There are millions of wild animal species, so it generates the stars, moves, evolution chain and sprite images on the fly when a new animal is first encountered.
• Customer Finder - it's a wrapper for Google Search. Most people suck at finding customers, so the app takes your landing page and generates the search terms and site filters to find relevant threads.

What have I learned about?

• Controlling costs - most of my AI inference is free as I get free tokens from OpenAI, lookup the token sharing scheme.
• Speed - many of my applications need real time results, so you trade off using mini models to improve response time. You can make results appear as they come in, OpenAI image gen API even let's you show the image generation steps, better UX.
• Prompt Engineering - I let the AI, Claude Code, write the prompts. But I get it to run tests, assess the output quality and change the prompt as required.
• Testing - for my chatbot, I got Claude to create user personalities in a sandboxes environment, feed them through the chat and assess whether the chat was working as intended and adjust it.
• AI Operations - API calls sometimes fail, e.g. due to server issues, timeouts, moderation. Make sure your application is setup to retry failures, perhaps with exponential back off, e.g. after 1 minute, 1 hour, 24 hours.

For free to ask me anything, I have been doing this for ~2 years when at the start you actually had to spend days writing a prompt and building the system around it to get the correct output, because models were not intelligent and were more expensive. Now, models are more intelligent and cheaper.

Some things I've adopted where I'm ahead of everyone else:

• Giving unlimited AI usage away for free. As I get free tokens from OpenAI, my customer finder tool can service about 10,000 per month at zero cost to me, so I give it away for free with unlimited usage. It helps me get more users and I can monetise it later with premium features if I want to.
• Using LLMs to populate your database. If your application dies not need exact values, e.g. carbon footprint estimates, you can get a "good enough" result by using an LLM. It's quick way to get started and you can use official data if you gain traction.
• Generating assets on the fly in real time. For my game, I don't have to hand draw or even use AI to create game assets, e.g. animal sprites, ahead of time. If you test and trust your prompt enough, you can create the game assets on the fly, e.g. when a user discovers a new animal that is not cached in the database, the image gen model creates the sprite image based on my instructions and the images come consistent every time, so far.

Did you know that in Google Search you can limit your search results to a specific domain by using "site:reddit .com" for example and then the search terms.

I do this myself for my products and often recommend it to other people, so I thought why don't I just automate it?

It's a free tool, unlimited usage. My calculation says I can support 10,000 searches per month, so don't think I will get near that, haha.

You just drop in your app / product url and it generates the Google search queries for you and gives you a link to the search results. Congratulations! You've just found hundreds of people who already want your product!

It lets you filter by timeframe and exclude search terms. If you don't have a product yet, you can just describe your idea and it will find relevant reddit threads with real users waiting for your product!

Try it out and let me know what you think! I vibe coded this in 2 hours this morning as soon as I had the idea, haha.

See the images for an example, I found a random vegetarian dogfood website, dumped the url into Reddit Thread Finder and it returned tens of search pages with Reddit users looking for / discussing vegan dogfood!

Then you simply go in and organically comment with your product!

THE LINK IS IN THE COMMENTS

In Google Search you can limit your search results to a specific domain by using "site:reddit .com" for example and then the search terms.

I do this myself for my products and often recommend it to other people, so I thought why don't I just automate it?

It's a free tool, unlimited usage. My calculation says I can support 10,000 searches per month, so don't think I will get near that, haha.

You just drop in your app / product url and it generates the Google search queries for you and gives you a link to the search results. Congratulations! You've just found hundreds of people who already want your product!

It lets you filter by timeframe and exclude search terms. If you don't have a product yet, you can just describe your idea and it will find relevant reddit threads with real users waiting for your product!

Try it out and let me know what you think! I vibe coded this in 2 hours this morning as soon as I had the idea, haha.

See the images for an example, I found a random vegetarian dogfood website, dumped the url into Reddit Thread Finder and it returned my tens of search pages with Reddit users looking for / discussing vegan dogfood!

Then you simply go in a organically comment with your product!

THE PRODUCT LINK IS IN THE COMMENTS

I had the idea from seeing loads of people asking "How do I find users?" and also because I use "site:reddit.com <search tags>" myself for every product I make.

How does it work? - Just input your landing page / app store url or a product description. The AI generates the relevant search terms and returns it to you as a Google search.

You just click the search button and you can see tens of threads with users talking about the problem that your product solves! Comment on the posts, reply to comments, steal ideas, send DMs - it's up to you!

For example, if you've created an app that reminds pet owners when to feed their dog, you just dump the app store page url into the app, click "Find Users" and it generates the Google search, like:

• site:reddit.com pet feeding confusion

It's free with unlimited use, just thought it was something cool to share with the community!

Link in comments as Reddit blocks Render domains.

Let me know what you think!

You capture real wild animals with your phone camera, when you're physically out in nature. You then battle them, level them, trade them and compete with other players to take ownership of gyms.

Every real world park has a gym inside it where a player will be holding their animals and fighting off any challengers. The global leaderboard ranks who is currently holding the most gyms worldwide.

You can also play it casually, catching animals, levelling them and evolving them. A caterpillar evolves into a chrysalis into a butterfly for example.

It has every animal species in the world, it works in a similar way to the Seek app if you've heard of it.

You heal your animals at health centres, which are located at real world places of worship: mosques, churches, temples etc.

You buy items including nets for catching, potions for healing and revives at real world grocery stores.

You earn leaves (in-game currency) by catching animals, discovering new ones and beating other players in PvP or taking over and holding gyms against challengers.

It works world wide, as I said above, the game uses real world locations as in-game points of interest, which is pretty cool.

You can't capture animals when you're in your house, you have to physically get out into nature, the game map knows when you're in urban / residential areas.

The further you go from urban areas, the higher the animal levels! You have to battle down high level animals to catch them, it's not easy!

I built this game over the last month, coding about 10 hours a day every day. I launched it the other day and now it has a handful of players worldwide, over 300 unique species captured so far and multiple gyms taken over!

Please check it out and let me know what you think! It's available on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762081213

And it's available in early testing on Android, so DM your Google Play email if you would like to play.

It's a paid game, $4.99, as it has taken me hundreds of hours to develop and it costs money to pay for servers, maps, image recognition etc, but I think it's a pretty cool! Also, there's no in-game purchases BS, buy once and play for ever.

You can also add your friends and battle & trade with them to fill out your team.

Looking to gather some mental data from other people's experiences who have used Snap.

Based on these prices, is it pretty much guaranteed that I would be assigned the 7:04am train?

The Snap price is £65 for the morning slot. I love this concept, but I'll have to rush quite a bit to get to the station from my national train.

I saw this sign while cycling, had to take a photo and compare it to the in-game map! Pretty accurate!

Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762081213

I'll keep this interesting for the OpenStreetMap crowd!

I wanted to make a game that gets people physically out in nature and gets them appreciating wild animals. Which I think I've now achieved!

Challenges:

How to get players out of their house?

I used the OSM classifications to determine which areas you can capture animals in, as a proxy for "being in nature". I set it to grass, woods, water, sand.

As you know, OSM data is not good for areas like fields, so any unmapped areas are also populated as grass, which seems to work well and is fairly realistic to the real world.

How to have a progression system?

Most games, like Pokemon (which heavily inspired my game) have a linear system where wild pokemon levels increase as you go through the game. How would I solve this in a non-linear game? I.e. people can start from anywhere in the world.

The solution I came up with is to base animal levels based on proximity to residential, industrial etc. areas. Every few hundred meters from built-up areas, the animal level range increases by 5. (see admin picture with the coloured squares)

This maps nicely with real world difficulty increasing, i.e. you have to go far from home to find higher level animals. Outside your house, they'll be level 1-5, but in the Peak District (national park) in the UK they'll be level 31-35.

How to have points of interest in the game?

The game needs to have both Health Centres to heal / store your animals at and stores to buy items at. I had to brainstorm what would be a good proxy for health centres that is evenly distributed throughout the world, in all countries, and is also visually recognisable in the real world.

I came up with places of worship for Health Centres, e.g. churches, temples, mosques. You don't have to physically go in them, I set a radius of 5 or 10 meters. I also did a bit of research and as far as I can tell every country in the world has good distribution of places of worship!

For stores, I just set them as real world grocery stores. So, when I go to the shop to buy something to eat I actually buy nets and potions in the game as well, haha.

How to have coverage of the whole world?

It would be monetarily expensive to have the global OSM downloaded, so instead as it's not really a fast-moving game, I just do a call to Overpass API in real time and generate the in-game renders on the fly. This takes around 10 seconds, which I think is ok as the main part of the game is photo'ing animals anyway.

Cache is king - I obviously cache both the Overpass API response and my game rendering on top of it to the database, so the wait time is only for the first player who visits that location. Over time, previously visited areas get populated in the database, i.e. around your house or your local park will only have to fetch the first time you go there.

Other cool stuff:

You'll notice that the buildings have shadows (image attached). This was pretty complicated, I use the building polygons from OSM and add a height to them to generate the 3D object that the shadows are projected from. However, I didn't want buildings to have flat roofs as that's unrealistic, so I generated a centreline using PCA to get the longest length of the building and then create a triangular roof along that. The shadows are accurate to the real world, based on the time of day, time of year and Lat Long. I also added real-world weather, e.g. rain, wind, cloud cover, but that's unrelated to OSM.

I pre-generated designs for roof types and colours, then I pass the geographic region from OSM to an LLM (like ChatGPT) and get it to select the appropriate roof type and colour. E.g. Bologna, Italy has red terracotta roofs and Mayfair, London has grey slate roofs (see images).

Other Challenges:

Had to make paths invisible to the capture zone indicator, otherwise you can be in a field and walking on a path and the game will say you're in a non-capture zone.

OSM data has overlapping polygons in many places, so had to set a priority level, e.g. buildings on top, then paths/roads, then terrain etc.

Some weird quirks with rendering different polygons clockwise and anti-clockwise which caused them to cancel out when they overlapped.

Adding blurred edges to some polygons, e.g. paths, to make them look more realistic.

Link:

Link here if anyone wants to check it out (mods said ok to share): https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/animalis-game/id6762081213

It's a paid game as it has taken me hundreds of hours to build, the map isn't even the core feature of the game, haha.

Feel free to ask me any questions, happy to share my experience!

Happy to answer any questions about the process, not just trying to sell my game.

I wanted something that was like Pokemon, but using real animals and in the real world. The aim of the game is twofold: get people out into nature & get them appreciating wild animals.

I've been playing with my friends and family and it's already fulfilling my aim!

You start off with a couple nets and healing potions (for the animals) and have to physically go out into natural areas, e.g. parks, woods, lakes etc, to photo and catch real wild animals. Once photo'ed, you can throw a net to capture them and once you have your first animal you can battle the wild animals to level up your own, which increases their stats, teaches them new moves and evolves them (yes, just like Pokemon). For example, a caterpillar will evolve into a chrysalis, then butterfly. You can also catch any evolution stage directly.

I came up with a clever way to have a progression system, the further you are from human areas, e.g. residential, industrial etc, the higher level the animals are. Once you get like 1 km away from built-up areas you need to battle the animals down first before you capture them. It's not easy!

I wanted health centres and shops to be well distributed throughout the real world, so I came up with using places of worship (churches, temples, mosques etc) and using real world grocery stores as in-game stores. You have to physically walk to one to buy your items and heal your animals!

If you're going out on a walk, you need to actually stock up on nets, potions etc. So, the game is not super easy, but I think that's what makes it fun and there's not a lot you can do in game from within your home, you have to physically get out in nature.

The currency is leaves, which you get for discovering, battling and capturing animals. If you're the first person in the world to discover an animal (very likely at the moment!) you get a bonus as well. Also, I use an official endangered species list, so more endangered animals give more leaves when you capture them etc. Each animal has it's full taxonomy listed within the game, so in your "Dex" you can see all the species from the different branches of the animal kingdom that you've caught.

On top of this, where available, I have the real animal's call within the game, which I think is kinda fun.

PvP: you can add friends and either trade or battle with them. Trading helps you fill out your Animal kingdom and improve your team. Battling awards leaves from the losing player to the winner!

As well as this, other cool stuff:
- it obviously uses a map of the real world, but it also has real-time accurate building shadows based on your Lat Long and the position of the sun, time of year etc.
- has live real world weather in the game, e.g. cloudy, raining, snowing, wind.

The game is procedurally generated based off a real world map, so the first time any player visits a new location, I quickly fetch the map data and render our game world on top of it (would be too expensive to render the entire globe ahead of time).

For AI people: I generate the animal moveset, evolution chain and sprite images in real-time the first time a species is discovered by any player. This takes ~10 seconds, during which I just say "Researching" within the game. So, it is possible to generate game assets on the fly, I haven't seen anyone else do this.

It's available on Android as well, but I need your Google email as it's in closed testing until I get 12 players using it for 2 weeks.

You just buy the game once and you can play it forever, no in-app purchases, I don't sell your data or advertise anything. I just wanted a simple game that people can play.