We had a chance to talk with the development team behind Storimod, a real time PvP and social network for Pokemon GO. You can read our Storimod review here.
How did Storimod start, what was the inspiration?
We were inspired initially to give access to Pokemon GO to all players, regardless of location, time, or mobility status.
We never really wanted to “beat Niantic to the chase” so to speak, we just wanted our friends who had concerns with getting out and playing to have as much fun with the game as we are.
Are you afraid that Niantic will shut you down?
I think all third party developers are concerned Niantic will shut them down. From my perspective Niantic is so desperate to rid the game of trackers and scanners so they can implement new and exciting features, anything is risky business until they get that mess out of the game.
We don’t touch their server, player accounts, or anything like that. We are just using Pokémon stats via screenshots to fulfil our experience.
Our team met with Niantic’s CTO, Phil Keslin back in August. He gave us great advice on how to steer our product in a way that wouldn’t affect their game’s current experience.
Although we didn’t come out of that meeting with a contract of any sorts, or even guarantee that we can exist, we were definitely left with the impression that Niantic will not be pursuing crowd sourced tech as hard as they are scanners and bots.
What’s your opinion on the disabled in game tracker?
We think Pokemon Go is great, and we respect what Niantic is doing to the fullest. Even though it might seem hard to understand, a lot of the issues users have with the game are logical.
Niantic gets a lot of flack for attacking trackers, but I think if you really ask yourself “why”? It makes sense.
I believe tracking is disabled because it’s a huge liability. Niantic couldn’t have realized people were going to walk into traffic while tracking pokemon. Within a few days of GO being released, people were getting robbed, walking into traffic, and trespassing everywhere.
They removed the 3 step tracker, and those reports vanished. To me, keeping players safe is more important than finding freaking pokemon, and if they accomplished that, it’s amazing.
Now, they are trying to implement a system that gets you to the nearest Poke Stop by the Pokemon you select in the sightings list. I think that is super logical, and still implores users to use common sense first over blindly chasing Pikachu.
We are all about safety, and getting players in the game, and we think Niantic is doing a great job at providing a platform that is both fun and conscious of player well being.
Any new features or updates coming to Storimod soon?
Right now we are focusing first on getting all the kinks worked out. Our network grew super fast, and we are squashing any bugs that we can find. We are also getting load times fixed up as we speak.
As far as features, leaderboards will pop up soon for our users. That will be exciting, and let us start doing tournaments.
We also rolled out some light animations, and we’ll be doing A LOT more with that area in general in the next few weeks. We can’t say much, aside from there is a reason Storimõd is so sleek and barebones. The bigger stuff is hiding somewhere else 🙂
OH OH OH!
IOS. It’s pretty much done, we just need few more days to bug test and then we are submitting to the apple store.
Anything else to add before we wrap up?
We’d like to thank our developers, Mike, JP, and Glen, #pokeburgh, and r/pokemongodev and of course the Pokemon GO Hub for the first published article about our PvP system.
