Image courtesy Small Town RVA
It started, like many good ideas do, with a sense of wanting more.
When Joseph “Tripp” Cannella joined the Pokémon Go craze in 2016, he was excited by its potential. The game’s real-world map for catching virtual creatures was immediately appealing — but he felt more like an observer of Richmond than a participant in it.
“And then, I just had this idea. What if I could take a map of the city and make it look just like a little pixelated version of that?” Cannella says.
Years later, the concept ballooned into Small Town RVA, a free-to-play video game Cannella built over a Richmond city map spanning from the Pump House to The Poe Museum. Players controlling an avatar can follow a linear story mode, guided from objective to objective by hints, or roam freely in exploration mode at their own pace.
“You can create an account on there, [and] you can upload photos to certain spots,” Cannella says. These real-life images appear as pixelated Polaroids placed in corresponding game locations, which players can pick up and comment on.
Creating the game has been a labor of love for Cannella, a Richmond native and Virginia Commonwealth University alum. Small Town RVA’s bitmapped art style and top-down perspective evoke Nintendo Game Boy classics such as Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda, but the content borrows from his own experiences and Richmond lore, including foraging pawpaws along the James River, uncovering Easter eggs referencing local legends and more.
Cannella began working on the game five years ago. He taught himself how to use video game creation engines, gradually adding features beyond re-creations of roads and buildings during hours spent bouncing between his day job and spending time with family. Aside from a handful of open-source code that he bought or was free to use, “all the code, infrastructure, backing for it — that’s all stuff that I’ve written,” Cannella explains.
Small Town RVA went live on web browsers (at smalltownrva.com) in early October, announced via a post on the popular r/RVA subreddit page, and currently boasts a few hundred daily active users. The project — and Cannella’s passion for it — is centered around its connection to the Richmond community.
In addition to players providing feedback about the gameplay, musicians and other contributors have reached out to Cannella with audio or visual assets. “One of my favorite things is just seeing other players having fun with it and interacting with it,” he says.
Cannella’s to-do list of game improvements includes finding a local artist to design a new logo, as well as refining other features before moving Small Town RVA to iOS and Android as a mobile app. He’s also interested in adding an audio-sharing feature for music and ensuring that player accounts transfer from the browser version.
“I’m hoping that there’s enough engagement to guide what it becomes — into not just being my telling of what it’s like to live here, but more of a community’s version of it,” Cannella says.
And yes, he plans to add the local Lowe’s cat and Richmond royalty, Francine.
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