About CryptoCam

CryptoCam is a game about field cryptozoology, played on a phone. You walk to places where something has reportedly been seen, photograph what is there, and the game turns that photograph into a full species report: a scientific name, a classification, a written description and an illustration. Everything that has been documented is then published on this website, where anyone can read it.

The creatures in CryptoCam are fictional. They are generated by the game, they are not evidence of anything, and the “Cryptozoological Research Institute” is the fiction the game is built around, not a real institution. The map, the walks and the photographs are real. The cryptids are the game.

How a field report is created

A report is never written by hand. The chain from a photograph to a published entry works the same way every time:

1. Sightings appear on the map. Spawning is deterministic: a tile generates the same sighting points for everyone, and those points last for a day. Nothing is placed by hand.
2. You walk to the point and photograph it. Location and distance are checked, so a sighting has to be reached on foot.
3. The photo is analysed. Weather and map data for that spot are collected with the photo, because the same location in different conditions produces different creatures.
4. A species report is generated. Name, taxonomy, rarity, description and illustration are produced for that one individual. Existing species may be reused when the environment matches closely, so the same creature can be encountered twice by different researchers.
5. The entry goes live here. The report is published on the discoveries feed below the account that documented it, and it stays part of the public record.

Discovering, capturing and trading

Documenting a specimen makes you its discoverer, and the discovery credit never changes hands. Capturing is a separate step: it can succeed or fail, and a captured specimen gets its own individual name and a modified illustration. Captured specimens can be traded in the auction house, stored in a vault where they cannot be captured from you, or minted as a collectible. Ownership and discovery are tracked separately, which is why the same entry can carry two different names on the site.

Battles, which are opt-in, are turn-based and narrated move by move. They are rare in practice: the point of the game is the documentation, not the fighting.

What this website is, and what the game is

This site is the public side of the project: the discoveries feed, individual species entries, the auction house and your collection. It shows what researchers have documented and it lets you read a full report without installing anything.

The map, the walking, the camera, the capture attempts and the battles only exist in the mobile app, because they depend on your location and your camera. If you want to document something yourself, you need the app.

Common questions