Niantic dev shares Pokemon GO dev details, future plans and more

The following information comes from the "Origins of Pokemon GO" discussion, given by Niantic technical artist/designer David Hollin...

- Pokemon GO started as an April Fool's joke by Google in 2014
- Niantic CEO John Hanke thought it would make for a fun actual game, so he tried contacting the Pokemon Company
- The Pokemon Co. CEO was a huge fan of Ingress, Niantic's previous game
- the idea to move ahead was made, and Pokemon Co. wanted the game to be simple and unique
- Niantic's main goal in creating Pokemon GO was to get people to walk around outside
- the secondary goal was to get people to notice nearby landmarks and hopefully interact with other players
- the game originally started with the player throwing Pokeballs by pressing a button
- there was no control over how far or curved your throw would be
- before AR was considered, Niantic fiddled with the idea of using Google Earth images and superimposing Pokemon
- this would have required users to download huge images and would not have been practical
- Hollin toyed with incorporating AR mode and his phone camera in his backyard and showed it to his coworkers
- the idea was liked enough to implement into the final game
- Niantic was in a time crunch to release Pokemon GO by Summer because otherwise
- they wanted to get the game out when weather was good and players could get outside
- when the game launched, Niantic had only two server engineers who had to work 24/7 in shifts to handle the server issues
- the response was 50x what Niantic expected
- Niantic keeps tabs on subreddits to see what bugs are being discovered
- Niantic says "Battling is not the worst thing in the world, but it's the worst thing in Pokemon GO."
- trading is being worked on, but Niantic is taking its "sweet time" to release it because it's a veritable Pandora's Box
- Hollin has interest in weather-related spawns
- Niantic was finally able to incorporate different spawns based on the time of day/night
- when asked about Shiny Pokemon being included, he said "no comment"
- regional Pokemon are a thing because Tatsuo Nomura really wanted players to feel the scope of the Pokemon world
- Niantic is working with Apple to see if they can come up with something to count your steps while you're exercising indoors
- Hollin is pretty sure players have discovered all of the Easter Eggs in the game