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Show HN: SuperTrip

supertripgame.com

69 points_kcn827 comments

Here's the best feedback I can give you- a real time description of my thoughts as I scan/scroll:

1. "supertrip" – what is this? drugs? roadtrip? backpacking?

2. 'not your typical adventure' - well that's a waste of a subheader, doesn't tell me anything. Bad first impression.

3. 'not for the faint of heart' still nothing. You could cut this sentence out and literally lose nothing. You're wasting precious seconds of attention here.

4. 'you and your friends will travel to locations you never thought were there... ah! So it's a sort of real-life waypoint driven amazing-race type thingy.

5. 'choose how many waypoints, how long a game, race or go as a group...' ah, that actually sounds like an amusing way to kill an afternoon with some friends.

You're completely burying the lead there, friend. Kill 2 and 3, and lead with 4 and 5. Uber says "everyone's personal driver", not "not your typical journey" or "not for the outdated commuter" or something like that. You have precious seconds of attention. Don't tell us what your product isn't. Tell us IMMEDIATELY what we can expect to do, and what the benefit is.

Cheers

This feels like a bait and switch. Saw a free app, installed it, registered, gave it permissions and my location, and only THEN did I find out the the actual feature of the game 'SuperTrip' is a paid feature and requires an account upgrade.

The FoodTrip mode is free and actually kinda useful

Is there a booking system built in. Presumably the restaurants pay to be featured - so you pay for FoodTrip in the cost of your meal [as with all marketing] - but if you do a FoodTrip is there a way to make sure you don't arrive and not get a table?

I feel like that would defeat the premise of the game. The whole point is that you don't know where you're going until you get there.

There is no restaurant featuring or anything like that. The game only takes distance and price into account, which the user specifies, when you FoodTrip. This is literal free marketing for restaurants right now.

Sorry you feel that way. I specify in the description, the website, and images that the adventure mode is paid. That's why FoodTrip is free (and personally, I think FoodTrip is better haha).

However it's completely understandable if you didn't read it. So again, sorry about that!

Sorry if this is n00bish, but I may not understand what SuperTrip is. The site mostly describes what SuperTrip isn't and when describing what it is, I'm just seeing lots of non-specifics.

I tried to watch the video to understand, but again, I'm not sure I get it.

I looked for a summary, but the only concrete information is "The goal of the game is to reach all the destinations."

It seems like a treasure map via AR...is that right?

Always for new and interesting AR stuff, but the website has my eyes hurting. Everything overlaid on top of an image is barely readable, and even the video is hard to watch with the background behind it. It's really a stark contrast to the rest of the site.

Yes, I was having issues myself reading the site. The text might benefit from a black border, really anything to keep it from getting lost in the images.

This seems quite similar to Geocaching - did you take inspiration from it? In fact the only differences seem to be that there is no physical object at the destination, and that it's a race.

SuperTrip is very inspired by my personal experiences geocaching. I always loved geocaching but hated the hide-and-seek mechanics of it. I've spent way too many hours searching for a geocache once I was at the destination and often giving up. SuperTrip is my personal answer to that. Rather than use a GPS location, SuperTrip is only a direction and distance. The location is abstracted so you don't know where you are going but at the same time, the final destination isn't hidden. For me, it made it more of an adventure. Plus, once you reach a destination, you've made it. There is nothing physical at the locations, and the first version is only a pat on the back, but the goal is for there to be in-game rewards for reaching destinations. I just haven't developed all of that yet.

Any plans to allow user created courses? Can think of 100 uses for a user created course to be immediately accessible to a bunch of phones from a virtual alleycat bicycle race to a LARP.

Hello, I'm the developer of SuperTrip. My friend posted this and I saw there are a few questions. Just reply to this comment and I can answer whatever!

I don't understand what SuperTrip is from the page or the video. Is it some kind of treasure hunt?

I'll bet SuperTrip is an RTM, or at least a trademark, in the tourism space already.

It's a class 9 RTM for Olympus in the UK (which clashes with what you're doing) FYI.

I'm not an IP lawyer and this isn't legal advice.

I think this is a typo: "Destinations are signified by green strobing destinations."

Also, I think your video would be better placed higher up the page: I had to scroll a long way to get to it.

I notice you launched on both iOS and Android which often a portable stack was heavily leveraged (e.g. Xamarin or HTML5). Can you share some tech details?

I used Google App Engine for my backend and Unity for the app itself. The code base has very minimal changes between iOS and Android.

Sweet!

I cannot register with the android app for galaxy nexus.

Reminds me of Ingress.

http://www.ingress.com

Promising idea. I like it. Does this work with any city, or is it just select cities?

Works pretty much anywhere. Though if it can't find destinations or previous locations in the area (on the ocean), it creates random ones.

Cool. I'll have to check it out then :)

So being an adventurer / go-getter / hero is walking down a concrete sidewalk admiring your surroundings through the lens of an augmented iPhone? I think that's disingenuous marketing to people like myself, and I'd focus on what it really is (gamification of urban discovery) because the current proposition comes off gimmicky.

When you talk about "adventure", I think the general consumer associates that with brands like REI, Patagonia, North Face, Cabela's, et al. Perhaps this is my own personal bias speaking but my gut says otherwise. Lastly, if I was in the military sacrificing my life to protect SuperTrip, I'd probably throw a fit about the "true heroes" phrase too. Is this app going to jump on a bomb for me?

My advice would be to pick a market segment and laser focus on it and then grow from there (or pivot). Maybe it is "adventurers", in which case you need to ditch the urban scenery.

Good points. As you pointed out, this is gamification of the real world. I didn't even think of "true heroes" being taken in that context. I was applying it from a game player perspective. Everyone is a hero in a video game. This allows you to be a hero in SuperTrip.

I'm just a one man team (aside from contractors) with some marketing experience but am still definitely learning so I need all the feedback I can get. Thanks :)

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