Goal of the tool: To get people out in nature and appreciating wild animals
Niche it fills in the iNaturalist ecosystem: It is a family friendly game where you can compete with other players by building up your team and take over local gyms. The game gets people out into nature, recognising and appreciating wild animals, who otherwise wouldn’t.
Is there a commercial component, or do you plan into include one in the future? Are donations requested? (yes/no, explain): Yes, the game has an optional plan to unlock unlimited usage in order to support development & server costs
What sort of data (if any) does your app collect from its users?:
Account — a username you pick, gender, a device ID, and optionally an Apple/Google sign-in ID (just the ID, not email or name).
- Location — precise GPS while the app is open; it’s the core of the game.
- Photos — every capture photo goes to OpenAI to identify the species, then is deleted within ~24h (up to 30 days if flagged as a photo-of-a-screen). The AI’s written description of what it saw is kept 30 days.
- Gameplay — captures, team, levels, items, battles, purchases (store, platform, dates).
- Diagnostics — crashes, battery/device telemetry, onboarding-funnel taps, app version, push token + timezone, and anti-cheat “teleport” events that include coordinates.
(no email, no real name, no ads, no data selling)
Link to your iNaturalist profile: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/rcwhiteley
Description: A nature game played outside. Photograph the real wildlife around you to capture it, build your encyclopaedia, battle and grow your team — and hold the gym in your local park.
Discussion questions or areas seeking feedback:
The game uses commercially available animal call sound files from the iNat API as the sounds for animals when you encounter one in game, by photoing the animal. I fetch the sound call in real time for any newly discovered species in the game, then trim it to the first 5 seconds of audio and play it when that animal appears on your screen.
I am looking for feedback from the iNat community and how well you think the animal calls work in-game, any improvements that can be made. I could maybe do more intelligent parsing of the audio files, e.g. removing noise, checking for non-noise sounds and cutting the file to that part.
I’ve included some screen captures from the game (can’t share videos in this post). When you encounter the wild animal is when its and your animal play their sound call, in turn.
This is the link: https://playanimalis.com/
