No more 5-digit code

[Rain336]

Currently for the Collect 'em All game you need to enter a 5-digit code manually. I would suggest changing this.

NFC Badges

One solution I came up with is to use NFC in the Fursuit Badges. That way you just need to hold your phone next to the badge to catch the Suiter. But this has one major problem. Can we get Fursuit Badges with NFC?

Bar Code

A second solution is to use some kind of car code like a QR code or similar. This is less intuitive as the NFC solution but doesn't need a change of badges. I don't really know if this is better than the current solution, but this issue is mostly just an idea I had.

[Nikoshi]

If already had the idea with a qr code system in my head but I think that it would not speed things up, because you need good lightning to scan the code. the nfc idea sounds actually really nice

[Pinselohrkater]

We've looked both at NFC and bar codes - and while I agree they sound nice and like it'd be quite fun - they introduce a range of issues we don't have a solution for at the moment.

First and foremost - "Collect'em All" isn't part of the native application, but it's in a shared React-based web app. We've gone this route to reduce development/maintenance effort on the native apps, and be able to make changes/adjustments more quickly since this is a feature where you need to be online anyway.

This limits us a bit in regards to using NFC, because the Web NFC API is still in draft and there's close to zero support for it on devices yet; so we'd have to triage this via the native apps somehow. Assuming we did that - we'd lose about a fourth of our players, who do not have an NFC capable phone (yet). Furthermore, NFC cards that are suitable for printing - despite not expensive individually - add a fair share of extra cost compared to 'blanks'.

2D Bar Codes we considered as well. They'd be pretty easy to consume from the web-app via access to the camera, but the issues we've seen there were readability. Fursuit badges are printed one-sided only. A "reasonably big QR code" on the backside would work; on the front side however standard 1D Barcodes read really badly when embedded into artwork, and only Datamatrix is compact enough to read somewhat reliably and fit into the design without taking up a lot of space. The "somewhat reliably" applies to a color-print out on regular paper scanned in office conditions - it's sadly unreliably on a semi-reflective plastic card in subobtimal lighting conditions.