Guardian of the Blue Light

Recently, standing on the shoulders of those who’ve come before me, most notably Shawn Graham whose javascript was invaluable, I created a Twine game that pulls geolocation data.

I built Guardian of the Blue Light mainly as a proof of concept, hoping to recruit the good folks at the next gathering of the Baltimore/DC Interactive Fiction meetup group as my testers. The meetup occurs monthly at the Board and Brew in College Park, Maryland and I figured they’d be a knowledgeable, captive audience!

The game is a little rough and once I get more feedback on how the geolocation worked for everyone I’m going to tighten the writing and visual style. My first tester, for instance, couldn’t get her phone to pull the necessary location data from the start. She doesn’t normally have her phone’s location tracking turned on so I suspect there’s some specific, necessary order of events that needs to occur for this to work on most devices. Something along the lines of: turn on location tracking >> clear last browsing session >> open URL in native browser >> etc.

Since I geocache and regularly use many different geolocation apps, my devices are probably a little more ready for this sort of thing than most people. There’s going to be some trial and error for a while, but if you try this, please let me know how it goes! I’d love to get this right and then publish the code for others to use.

The adventure starts at the Board and Brew. Play: Guardian of the Blue Light.

(P.S. Have no hope of getting to College Park, Maryland? You could always play my text adventure Redactor...)