We are really excited to present Travel Bug, a new PS Vita Discovery app available for free download later today.
The premise of Travel Bug is simple. You first hatch a bug, then name it, then, using near, send it out on an adventure. Once it’s out in the real world, you will get regular updates as it meets strangers on its travels until it comes back to your PS Vita.
So let’s talk about the intrepid explorers: the Travel Bugs.
The first time you start the app, you will see a little larvae sitting on a leaf of your Home Tree. Tap it and it will hatch your first Travel Bug. You can name it and dress it up with items from the bug shop, then it’s time to send it out on its first adventure.
Although you start with just one bug, you can then go hunting for others. If you hit sync in the game, you will activate near, which will gather any nearby bugs and pop them in your net. Here you can check out the bugs and decide if you want to help them out on a journey.
All of the bugs that you help will appear on spare leaves on your home tree where you can tap on them and find out more about them, and even see if they are on a secret mission.
We see the bugs as one of the ways in which a player can be represented to others in the Travel Bug community. You are able to personalise them with items from the shop, and you are also able to add a message to the bug for others to see and share.
As the Travel Bugs represent other people, you also have to take care of them. Each bug needs feeding to keep it happy (make it very happy and it may give you a secret surprise). If you neglect a bug it will eventually leave and travel back to its owner.
We knew that we wanted the Bugs to explore the globe, but that would only be possible if strangers would be willing to pick up Travel Bugs and help them travel further. To do this we had to offer an incentive to get involved.
So, we decided that everyone who picks up a bug and helps it on a journey will get rewarded with Bugmiles for the part of the journey you help contribute, and also a share of the Bugmiles that the Travel Bug collects upon completion of its overall journey.
Once we had this co-operative currency loop working it started to feel good, but then we found another potentially even more satisfying reward for helping bugs out on their journey. Every time you drop a new Travel Bug you have to take a photo of it. This photo will then get shared with everyone else who has helped that bug on its journey when they next start up the app. This ensures that you’ll likely have a range of surprises waiting for you, whenever you turn it on.
We’ve had a great time developing Travel Bug, and we hope that you all download it from the PlayStation store and create your own bugs and help others on their journeys. There is so much more we want to do with Travel Bug and we would love to hear your feedback. In the meantime please post your favourite pictures on Facebook and let’s start seeing where these intrepid little bugs will end up next!
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62 CommentsAdd Yours
51
Posted on 30 November, 2012 at 2:12 pm by gameszoid
hi i have travel bug and i live in Pakistan: Karachi sadly near doesn’t work here and i don’t know how to use the gps and i really like this game but it uses gps and i don’t know what to do i cant go on a journey either help please and help me with my near problem
52
Posted on 30 November, 2012 at 4:15 pm by Asif_wani96
I have created a bug and dropped it in my home…..
i would be grateful…..
will the bug walk off on its own or someone has to first pick it up and drop it somewhere ?
and if several days pass and my bug isn’t picked up, will i be able to view my bug again for customization ?
as AlucardDHK said and i too think it will be more convenient if we drop the bug through messages and make it travel a LOT FURTHER so that greater bugmiles are earned !!!
please pay heed
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 3:18 pm by Craig Howard
Travel Bug uses near. This hunts for bugs in a large radius, so if you drop it in your house there should be a good chance that it will be picked up by another local Vita user.
If a bug is not picked up it will return home after a couple of days.
We are listening to the feedback and will look at fixes / feature updates
53
Posted on 30 November, 2012 at 10:32 pm by POLSKAPUNK20
sounds good fun.
54
Posted on 1 December, 2012 at 12:44 pm by Tod_UK
Anyone else having a problem posting to facebook? It’s just not appearing on facebook for me?
55
Posted on 1 December, 2012 at 4:04 pm by spacemonkey15
Its a nice little app (as is t@g) but something really bothers me with Near, Travel Bug, T@g and that is the constant “do you want to sync your location”, “you need to open near and sync”, “you must wait for near to finish”, “sync your location” messages that have to be acknowledged during use of the software.
Why can you not just remove the constant popup messages and have it sync and so on with Near as a background process ?
All the minimise app, open near, sync near, minimise near, open app, sync app and the constant popup messages whilst using the apps are very very annoying.
I’ll get off my soap box now ;O)
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 3:23 pm by Craig Howard
The messages are all required as we use near. There is no way in Travel Bug that we can stop these messages due to Sony requirements. We are constantly in contact with Sony to see if we can enhance the Travel Bug experience.
56
Posted on 2 December, 2012 at 1:21 am by THEDAZ-3000
This is a cool program and my kids live creating new bugs and sending them off however the biggest problem with some of the games which rely on NEAR to trade or share goods is that NEAR needs to be integrated into games and apps and do everything automatically rather than take u from the game screen into near then ask you to press the update button etc. unless u specifically want to use NEAR I think u really should never have to see the program during gameplay , just needs to be more seemless. Travel Bug is a great app though thanks heaps for making it
57
Posted on 2 December, 2012 at 2:49 pm by monoliet
40 pers near lot peopel have the game but mi bug fly 0
+ i not find 1 other bug !!!
58
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 12:37 pm by BoBKiD
Hello,
thanks for this great and fun game.
There are some serious… bugs in the game and it crashes very frequently.
There are two major problems that need to be solved:
1) If someone finds one of your bugs, they can keep them as long as they want and maybe never release them. I currently have 5 bugs traveling and they are stuck somewhere since the game was released! An option to auto-release a bug after X amount of time (e.g. 2 days) would be great.
2) Clicking the “find bugs” button won’t always search the Travel Bug servers but asks if the user wants to check “near”. Instead of doing this just one time and then check the servers, the game keeps checking only “near” and it never finds any bugs (just gifts).
3) The scoreboards trophy needs to be re-vamped, as 99% of the players will NEVER be able to get it. If the top user in the leader boards keeps playing, no one will ever pass his scores, and even if someone does, it will only be 1 or 2 people. What about the other thousands of players? I’d suggest adding a new leader-board table with rewards, that resets every week or month. (e.g. best players of the month get some nice unique clothes).
Thanks for your time. Keep up the excellent work.
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 3:32 pm by Craig Howard
Hi BoBKiD
Answers below
Point 1 – This is designed for a reason. Feeding a bug can allow you to take the bug on a journey (I have a friend taking a bug to Dubai next week, he is feeding him as he knows he will earn a lot of miles when he drops them). The risk he has is that he is spending his miles keeping the bug happy, else the bug will leave and return home.
Point 2 – Travel Bug replies on near, and this behaviour is a character of how it works. We will investigate to see if there is anything funky we are doing that can compound these issues.
Point 3 – We are looking at this and will look at changing this in the future.
59
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 1:20 pm by breakXedge
In addition to what BoBKiD posted I have to say that scoreboards are not working properly. I’ve been playing for several days with the scoreboard not updating for me. When it finally updated (just a few minutes ago) it didn’t count all the points I made…
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 3:33 pm by Craig Howard
again, thanks for this, we will take a look at it
60
Posted on 3 December, 2012 at 11:03 pm by NIghtweb
Hi sorry to bother you I’m finding i have a bug (no pun intended) I tap find bugs it asks to “Launch “near” to see if any Bugs are here?”, I do i sync near then return to the game which only responds by asking to launch near to find bugs again.
I’m taking this is not normal?
61
Posted on 5 December, 2012 at 5:55 pm by Jeegee
Same problem here, first launch Near picked up 3 bugs into my net, allowed me to choose 1 and the other 2 vanished. Since then I haven’t been able to find any bugs despite travelling an 80 mile round trip in NW England and syncing a ton of times. Near either just loops back to net screen which asks to start near if you select return to game or stays open and doesn’t return to game if you select to continue near to finish updates etc. Weird. also the link to ps store has no content still. Love it but it’s flawed atm. Hope you guys can fix it!
62
Posted on 6 December, 2012 at 9:49 am by Bodagh
My bug has done nothing since I released it. Also i haven’t seen any bugs created by any other users and the leaderboard has no data on it. Anyone else having such issues?
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