Turning GPS Into a Game Controller
# Turning GPS Into a Game Controller
I didn’t expect a chat about a GPS game to remind me why I started this show, but here we are. Talking with Jeff W. from World Seekers felt like somebody cracked open a window in a stuffy room. We started with marketing chaos, zigzagged through YouTube’s interest roulette, and ended up somewhere more interesting than outrage: the craft of making experiences that pull people outside, then bring them back in with something to think about. The wild part is how normal it all felt. Even folks who’ve shipped hits and built companies are still guessing, still experimenting, still showing up. That’s weirdly comforting.
## What we talked about
We kicked off on marketing because I can’t resist poking the algorithm monster. Jeff does CMO-level consulting by day and even he admits the ground keeps moving. Four years ago TikTok barely mattered. Now it’s the arena. For game devs that means discovery feels less like a funnel and more like a weather pattern. You publish, you pray, you iterate. On YouTube, subscribers used to be a lever. Now the home feed is pure interest. You can make twenty-five episodes and still feel invisible while the system decides who you are. It’s maddening and a little funny if you squint.
Then we wandered into attention economics. On mobile you’re not competing with other games. You’re competing with TikTok’s infinity scroll. Any title that steals minutes from that vortex deserves a postmortem. Retention, two-hour windows on Steam refunds, those small but brutal thresholds we all live under. Jeff and I compared notes on how even our own search habits drifted to libraries and books when the web started to feel like one long SEO cough. Sometimes the antidote to sameness is paper.
From there we shifted to World Seekers. It’s a narrative GPS game built in Unity that also lives on Steam, which sounds contradictory until you hear the plan. The GPS isn’t a location gimmick. It’s a controller. Walks become inputs. Biomes react to what you play. If you lean on fire cards your neighborhood heats up, fire creatures appear, and new dungeons unlock. Add water and you don’t just reset to neutral, you get mud and a different branch of the world. The map becomes clay you shape by moving and playing.
Marketing-wise, I’m still wrestling with the discovery problem like everyone else. But the conversation reframed it. Instead of chasing shiny tactics, pick a cadence that respects your life and make the content useful on its own. The algorithms can change their mind. People still share things that taught them something or made their day better. For a show like mine, that means I should keep leaning into genuine, nerdy curiosity and cut the rest. For World Seekers, it means showing the loop in motion. A fifteen-second clip where a sidewalk walk flips a biome says more than any trailer buzzword.
The last lesson is about ambition. Jeff doesn’t expect a runaway hit. He expects a conversation with other devs. Try the wild mechanic, publish the messy version, and give the next team a foothold. In a scene where everyone is terrified of being ignored, that attitude is a relief. It gives you permission to make the thing that could only come from you and let the market catch up later.
## My closing thoughts
I left this one thinking about how we measure progress. Not in views or wishlists, even though I won’t pretend those don’t matter. Progress might be how many days your game got you to take a walk. It might be how often a stranger felt like their block had secrets again. It might be you, at your desk, looking at a collection of items your pockets found while you were busy being a person, and smiling because your world feels a little bigger.
Next, I want to see more games that treat real life as part of the input, not a barrier to play. I want more Steam titles with companion loops that respect time. I want more single-developer experiments that feel like lab notes for the rest of us. And I want to keep having these conversations right after we hit stop, when the ideas are still hot and we’re quietly admitting that none of us have it figured out. That’s where the good stuff lives.
If World Seekers can turn GPS into a real instrument for story, even at small scale, it’ll push the conversation forward. That’s worth cheering for. In the meantime, I’ll be over here wrestling the algorithm, editing another episode, and yes, taking a walk. Consider that my daily patch.
Episode Info
We dug into why it’s on Steam at all. Jeff’s pitch is simple. Some days you go outside and log a run with your phone in your pocket. The game quietly forages while you live your life. Later you sit down at your PC and process everything you found, push the story forward, and craft. That loop makes health a feature instead of a chore. It also sidesteps the old Pokémon Go problem where the fun stops at your front door. Play anywhere, then catch up anywhere.
We kept circling one big ambition. How do you make your neighborhood feel like it has the density of story you get at a theme park. Not the branding, just the feeling that the ordinary place you walk every day has secret layers. That’s the dream behind World Seekers. It didn’t come from "let’s clone the leader" energy. It came from those early Niantic projects like Field Trip and Ingress, where walking and discovery made you feel better. The parts that fizzled were the rinse-and-repeat loops. Jeff wants the loop to evolve when you do.
## What stood out / lessons learned
The first thing that stuck with me is the mindset. Jeff treats mechanics like instruments and GPS like a new one we’ve barely learned to play. That framing helps. Instead of asking how to bolt location onto a UI, ask how movement can carry story beats, resource drops, and even moment-to-moment tension. When the controller is your city, you design pacing differently. You nudge someone toward sunlight at lunch, a side quest on the way home, a narrative payoff when they sit down at night. That’s bigger than a feature. That’s experience design.
Another thing that hit me is the Steam plus phone loop. We’ve all sent pets on missions in Monster Hunter or parked crew members on chores in MMOs. World Seekers flips it. You’re the pet. Your walk is the expedition. That makes wellness native to the loop without the sermon. I love that because it acknowledges how adults actually play. We’re juggling jobs, families, and the occasional sprint toward a deadline. If a game honors the real shape of a day, I’m already more loyal.
We also talked about art, tooling, and the eternal indie trade. World Seekers uses a lot of asset packs with custom patches where needed. That’s not a confession. It’s a strategy. Ship the mechanic that’s new, rent the parts that aren’t. On the AI front I’m pretty pragmatic. These tools make me more effective at the unglamorous stuff I’d never hire for, like turning meeting transcripts into clean action lists or roughing in a prototype. That’s not replacing an artist’s taste. It’s clearing the runway so the human decisions matter more. The line that matters to me is authorship. If the voice and vision are mine, the tools I use are part of the craft, not a shortcut around it.
