Hazards is a social game that uses your phone's GPS to compete with your friends by placing and trespassing on hazards, virtual traps placed in real locations. Sign up for the limited beta here. The basic gist is that you leave virtual hazards for people in the real world. When you check in to the game, you can place a hazard in that location if none exists. If you are within range of an already placed hazard, you will be caught trespassing and thus will have to pay a fine to the person who placed it. The object of the game is accumulate as many funds as possible by placing hazards in strategic, high traffic areas, maximizing returns on in game money spent. Hazards has a cross-platform friend and tournament system so our users can have single sign on and keep their friends up to date with happenings in the game (such as badges, tournament wins, etc). We spent a lot of time designing the game so it will be fun for all players, regardless of how many people are playing at one time. In fact, it's so extensive that we plan to submit academic papers about the algorithms we developed to self regulate the game's economy, players, and many invisible hands that help you along as you play.
Sounds Interesting Sounds like a fun game. I never really got into location based apps like foursquare because I saw any excitement in it, but I could see myself getting excited about Hazards. This way there is an intent to get some place before someone else so that you don't get caught trespassing. Can you elaborate more on the friends aspect. You say I will be able to keep my friends easily up to date, but does that mean friends in the game, text messages, emails, etc.? Look forward to the release, I signed up for your beta.
Sounds neat, but I'm interested as well in what the social aspects of this will entail. Push notifications? Or linking up to other social media outlets?
We've got both. Integration with Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare let you post notification and find friends. Friends are tied to account, rather than device, so if you have a phone and a tablet, you can have both on the same account. The leaderboard is based on your friends list, rather than a global leaderboard, so you can see how you compare with the people that matter in your life. We also have it set up so that you can check into foursquare through the Hazards client, so you don't have to keep opening both apps. Tournaments are the other big social component, but won't be available for the beta. Hazards is set up so you can set up a variety of tournaments. They can be private or public, team-based or individual, and you can have them operate globally, or be constrained to a specific area. Finally, organizations can pay to host sponsored tournaments. In these tournaments, the client is re-skinned for tournament participants in order to feature the sponsor's colors and logos. Sponsors also get to override in-game ads, so that particpant's only see sponsor's ads, or no ads at all. Is that what you were looking for?
