How to Create a Mission Series

How to Create an Ingress Mission Series

So you want to create your own Ingress mission series? After a bit of brainstorming and work, not only will your area have its own missions, but its own banner which represents your local community. First, come up with a theme! Your geographic area may work well for a series theme (ex. Southern Maryland, Memorial clusters around the District of Columbia, etc.).  Next, decide on how many rows you want to go with so you know how many missions you’ll want to create.  Each row contains 6 badges (separate missions). It is best to have 3+ rows so your image will come out looking great. Choose a series banner image that fits your theme! Each logo is suggested to be a 512×512 pixel image, which is then automatically cropped to create the scanner badge.  So, if you want to choose an image for a 3 row mission series, you’ll want to cut up a 3072×3072 pixel image into 18 equal parts, each 512×512 for highest resolution badges.  When you save each smaller image, go with a naming convention for each separate image that works for you (ex. A1.png-A6.png, B1.png-B6.png, C1.png-C6.png).

(Original Image)

(Added letters and then a grid layer on top of original image)

(Added a circle layer on top of the grid layer for preview)

(A generated template to see what the badges will look like, after revisions, to fit letters inside of circles)

You may want to come up with a naming convention for each mission. What’s better than a series of missions that make a cool banner when an agent is finished completing them all? One that makes sense.  Adding fractions to each mission title (ex. 1/18, 2/18, 3/18, etc.) can really help agents to see what’s next. Also adding the mission sequence number into the description can help a lot too! For example, [#SoMDMissions #1 of 18 missions].

 Find places for your missions. Use the Ingress Intel site, consider clusters and important places in your area of mission operations. Parks around your county or state/province? Maybe penguins or cranes that follow a certain route? Each mission can be different, as long as each mission follows some kind of a theme within the series. Be cognizant of park closing hours, portals that may include hiking, and total driving and walking times, as well as data signal strength at portal locations and waypoint locations. Some agents may have a difficult time getting to certain portals or waypoints for your missions if they have physical disabilities. For a series of missions, it is best if each mission is short and sweet, each location has good signal for the desired action, accessible at all hours, and in a geographic order from one to the next. Also, mission waypoints are sometimes directly on a portal and can lend themselves to frustration or totally inaccessible by your mission seekers.

Once you’ve decided on missions you’ll want to include in your series, order them by travel route from north to south / south to north, or east to west /west to east, whatever makes most sense giving them a traveling order.  Bad reviews will roll in if agents have to achieve missions on one side of a town or large area, and then have to continuously go back and forth from one side to another to achieve individual missions. Make it enjoyable!

Next, assign the missions to your badges, but remember: The last image (ex. C6.png) will be the first mission in your series. This is because your scanner slides missions down as an agent does them. So, mission #1 will be the last image of the banner, working back to the first image as the last mission. Finally, it’s time to actually create your missions. Be sure to match your missions and your images up appropriately. It helps to not have the same portals for multiple missions, where possible, and not include waypoints that are directly on top of portal locations, which can later cause frustration by those doing the mission. Be sure to have all edits you want to include in your mission before hitting that submit button! Currently, Niantic tends to respond quickly to submissions, but not as forgiving with edits! Using the draft feature can be a handy way to deal with missions when preparing to submit a large number of them at once. The browser programming that the Mission Creator uses saves as you change things, so don’t worry if you have to get up and take a break or do some more brainstorming.

When you have published all of your missions and they have been approved, confident you have created a series of missions with a banner that agents will enjoy doing, it is time to publish your series on social media like G+! Don’t forget to give a good outline of where places are, in the order they are to be done with the original banner image.  The final layout on a scanner may also entice agents to complete your series. Congratulate agents as they get your series done. Have fun and good luck!