u/Malik2924

Thinking through a mobile game idea and want to know if it's actually appealing before I build it.

The idea: explore different map scenes (forest, savanna, ocean, etc.) and find hidden animals, like a classic hidden-object game. The twist — rarity is tied to real conservation status. Common animals are easy finds, but the rarest ones in the game are actual near-extinct species in real life, with real facts about them. You build a collection over time and compete on a weekly leaderboard.

No loot boxes, no pay-to-win — just a collection/exploration game with some real-world meaning behind it.

Would you download this? What would make you stick around past the first week, and what would make you delete it?

I've been developing a concept for a mobile game and wanted to share it here for feedback before committing to a build.

The core idea: players explore a series of illustrated map scenes — forest, savanna, ocean, and so on — and search for animals hidden within each scene, similar to classic hidden-object games. Each animal belongs to one of four rarity tiers, and the tier isn't arbitrary — it's tied to each animal's actual real-world conservation status.

Common animals (rabbits, pigeons, squirrels) are easy to spot and placed in obvious locations. Uncommon animals are partially obscured. Rare animals are small and camouflaged within the scene. The rarest, Legendary tier, is reserved for animals that are genuinely near-extinct in the wild today, with populations in the low hundreds, and they're deliberately tiny and hidden within detail-heavy parts of the map.

Every animal a player finds gets added to a persistent "Habitat Book," a collection screen with a short bio card containing real facts and real population numbers, not fictional lore. The goal is for rarity in the game to carry actual emotional and educational weight, not just be a progression gimmick.

On the competitive side, there's a weekly leaderboard based on a rarity-point score, common animals worth 10 points up through legendary animals worth 200, resetting every week so it never goes stale. Ties are broken by whoever reached the score first, so there's never a shared rank even if multiple players complete the full collection.

For monetization, I'm deliberately avoiding loot-box mechanics, no random purchases for rare animals. Instead the plan is energy and search-radius boosts, a seasonal cosmetic pass, and collection-book customization, so progression stays skill and time based rather than pay-to-win.

I'd love feedback on a few specific things. Does tying rarity to real conservation data add meaningful appeal, or would most players just treat it as flavor text they skip past? Is the find-hidden-animals core loop differentiated enough from existing hidden-object games, or does it need a bigger hook like AR or GPS-based exploration to stand out? And what's historically killed retention for you in games with a similar collect-and-rank structure?

Appreciate any honest critique, including "this exists already" if that's the case.