Last week we looked at Greed City, an innovative location game based on Nokia’s HERE Maps platform that its creator has described as a mash-up between Monopoly and Foursquare.

Players earn credits for checking into businesses and they can use credits to buy or open up new businesses – all in real world locations. The goal is to build an empire and climb the worldwide Greed City Rich List.

Lighthouse Games Studios, a two-man team, in Durban, South Africa, developed Greed City. Formerly based in London, they’ve been going for four years, and have released over 16 games on the Xbox Indie Games market.

Greed City creator Edward Dennekamp, 32, develops games for Lighthouse Games Studio full-time. We spoke to Edward to find out more about the game.

What inspired Greed City and how long have you been working on it?

We’ve always been interested in Location Based games and after playing around with Foursquare for a while we realized it lacked a major gaming element and there was an opportunity to do something different. 

We came up with the idea early December and only really started to work on it mid-January and then submitted the first public version end of February.

What sort of feedback have you had so far?

Even at this early stage the feedback has been extremely positive, our ratings are 4 stars and higher in almost all countries. Players love the concept and find the UI very slick.

There has been very little negative feedback, although there was some confusion when we first launched it, as players did not understand how to play the game. We have since released an update that addresses those issues.

Players have also requested more ways to earn credits faster, which we have implemented in our latest release (ver 1.1.6).

How do you plan to improve the game in the future?

There are three phases to the game, ver 1.1.6 introduces Phase 2, which is the ability to upgrade businesses and offer better rewards.

Phase 3 is the one we are most excited about: it’s going to take the gameplay side of things to a whole new level of awesomeness! That’s all I can say for now.

How easy was it to work with Nokia’s HERE Maps technology platform?

Nokia’s HERE Maps is a big improvement over the previous maps. Nokia provides really good support on their developer website so it was really easy to get the app up and running with HERE Maps.

Greed City would still have been possible without HERE Maps integration, but it would have meant a bit more work and probably the end result would not have been as great.