After my last Oppo Hunt update a few people requested I use something other than Instagram for the game, which I was for. I was planning to use Instagram simply because it’s more convenient than an Oppo post that will inevitably be buried and need to be perpetually unburied. CobraJoe had suggested an app called GooseChase so I checked it out.
I actually wasn’t wowed at first. Mostly because of restrictive drop downs for certain things, instead of full input. Prime example: scoring for hunt items. When you want to set the score for an item you have a drop down with just four points options: 400, 500, 600, or 1,000. First off, those numbers are unnecessarily high (drop a zero ffs, it doesn’t affect things any), and second the range is just dumb.
Once I got past that though it was an excellent platform. Automated scoring! Live leaderboards! The ability to set start and end times for individual challenges so they can drop in and out mid-game! A well designed app interface! A fancy splash screen! Did I mention automated scoring? (Y’all, I’ve been doing this shit with an excel spreadsheet up until this point. It kinda sucks.) I was sold.
I spent the week making a list of checkpoints and challenges and inputting all 91 of them into GooseHunt, and setting times for the drop-in/drop-out activity challenges (these were going to be silly little things that can be done from pretty much anywhere but had to be done in a 48 hour window. Just a way to keep people engaged and offer some bonus points).
I go to the final page of setup to set the start and end times for the game and get everything officially ready to go, then I notice some grey text.
So I’d have to pay to run the game on GooseHunt. Shit. Well how much does it cost, maybe the price isn’t that much.
Double shit.
I spent Saturday googling customizable scavenger hunt apps and it was a similar story across the board. Prices varied, but all were well over $100. So, unless anyone knows of another platform that will work and can be set up on a ramen budget it looks like it’s back to Instagram and hashtags.
Speaking of, in case it does go back to being on Instagram there is now an official Oppo Rally IG account.