Pokemon Go Dev Reveals There Were Only Two Engineers At Launch, Niantic Reads Subreddits To Find Bugs And More

During a convention called Animation on Display (AOD) in Santa Clara which took place recently there was a panel titled “Origins of Pokemon GO” given by Niantic technical artist/designer David Hollin. Hollin has been with the game from the start and shares a tonne of interesting info in regards to how Pokemon Go came to be. Thanks to Reddit member bureika for taking notes at the panel. You can check out a run down of the things he shared with the audience below:

• Pokemon GO started as an April Fool’s joke by Google in 2014
• Niantic CEO John Hanke thought it would make for a fun actual game, so he tried contacting the Pokemon Company
• The Pokemon Co. CEO was a huge fan of Ingress, Niantic’s previous game
• the idea to move ahead was made, and Pokemon Co. wanted the game to be simple and unique
• Niantic’s main goal in creating Pokemon GO was to get people to walk around outside
• the secondary goal was to get people to notice nearby landmarks and hopefully interact with other players
• the game originally started with the player throwing Pokeballs by pressing a button
• there was no control over how far or curved your throw would be
• before AR was considered, Niantic fiddled with the idea of using Google Earth images and superimposing Pokemon
• this would have required users to download huge images and would not have been practical
• Hollin toyed with incorporating AR mode and his phone camera in his backyard and showed it to his coworkers
• the idea was liked enough to implement into the final game
• Niantic was in a time crunch to release Pokemon GO by Summer because otherwise
• they wanted to get the game out when weather was good and players could get outside
• when the game launched, Niantic had only two server engineers who had to work 24/7 in shifts to handle the server issues
• the response was 50x what Niantic expected
• Niantic keeps tabs on subreddits to see what bugs are being discovered
• Niantic says “Battling is not the worst thing in the world, but it’s the worst thing in Pokemon GO.”
• trading is being worked on, but Niantic is taking its “sweet time” to release it because it’s a veritable Pandora’s Box
• Hollin has interest in weather-related spawns
• Niantic was finally able to incorporate different spawns based on the time of day/night
• when asked about Shiny Pokemon being included, he said “no comment”
• regional Pokemon are a thing because Tatsuo Nomura really wanted players to feel the scope of the Pokemon world
• Niantic is working with Apple to see if they can come up with something to count your steps while you’re exercising indoors
• Hollin is pretty sure players have discovered all of the Easter Eggs in the game

Source / Via