So... I hope it's clear to everyone here why I decided to put this project on the back burner.
Ho yes. Definitely, yes.
NINTENDO, YOU IDEA-STEALING THIEVES. WHY MUST YOU BREAK POOR INDIGO'S HEART?
~~~
Improvement... hm. Randomly generated monsters?
Actually I stopped because I found out about Pokemon Go's development, and wasn't so eager to compete.
Of course now we have to wait for the inevitable fountain of clones.
Fortunately if the existing Pokemon clones indicate one thing, it's that these kind of games usually don't have features like randomly generated monsters. Probably because they are less marketable. So yeah, that's probably a good way to stand out...
Looks like a great project, too bad it got overtaken by events.
You can state that the monsters in your game are in a parallel reality, or spirit world, or whathaveyou so that they only appear through your monster-hunter device. The radar display can overlay information about the biome, game objects, and local effects. Real weather might impact the "local effects" as well (but I don't know how complicated that would be to scrape from a weather API).
If you decided to go AR instead of radar blips, then local effects can be applied to image either as filters or as particle effects.
For remote play, have the player start off with a scout creature that can be sent on missions to change the player's virtual location. Better training gives it greater range. Of course, some of the captured creatures might have scouting capabilities as well.
For drifting breaking immersion, just make sure that every creature is always in motion. That can also help avoid idling in an inaccessible location.
For additional flavor, some creatures simply "won't" enter certain terrains or effects. For example, a lightning lizard that will never willingly enter or even cross water. Even if it's safely inside your phone's virtual space, it still gets upset when you cross water (go on that seven-day cruise... I dare you). A water wyrm might have similar opinions of deserts.
These are some good ideas!
I definitely want to have some weather effects - in fact, I was thinking of making the game's basic "elements"
heat,
cold,
wet, and
dry, partially because heat and moisture are the simplest numbers that can be taken from weather services.
AR could be difficult just from a technical standpoint, especially for procedural generation. So I'll probably just go with radar and sprites for now.
I like the scouting idea, it could hopefully deal with some of the issues that Pokemon Go has with people trying to get into hard-to-reach places or not watching where they are going. Being in the right general area is more important than being in exactly the right spot. I kind of like the idea of keeping some of your own trained monsters 'outside' the device, and able to do things on their own when you're not paying attention. Maybe even 'falconing' where you can train them to catch other monsters for you.
Going to think over how much I want monsters inside the device to be affected by conditions outside it. My original idea was for the 'box' to be an entirely self-contained, climate-controlled space, but having them respond to your location could get interesting. Maybe you could 'upload' your monsters to the Internet in order to keep them safe when you went to a place they couldn't go, but since phones can access the Internet anyway this might be a bit redundant.