Role: Game Designer/Artist/Programmer

Engine: Unity (w/ Vuforia)

Time: 1 Year

Platform: Gear VR

This thesis breaches the topic of how designers can account for the fact that an AR game must contend with both virtual and physical realities.  To realize the potential of AR, it is necessary for designers to develop techniques which utilize the immersive capabilities of video games.  When a game is immersive it fully engages the player, creating a believable reality which elicits player engagement.  Upon integrating intelligent level design techniques, both new and old, augmented reality games become compelling and revelatory experiences.

• Set in an unspecified future where the player participates in AR training simulation led by a snarky robot narrator.  
• Aesthetically, the level looks and sounds like an industrial factory/warehouse.  This setting is not too cluttered and easy for players to immediately recognize without getting too specific about the space's details.  The generic nature of the setting makes it easier to apply to many different real-world spaces (only a blank wall is needed).  
• Recognizable props, such as TV's and wooden palettes, provide a touch of realism, contrasting the game's abstract elements such as floating "hazardous waste" projectiles.  
• The narrator drives the player forward through the gameplay.  While the player certainly maintains agency and control, the narrator educates the player about their environment and compels their action constantly.  

• The AR markers are particularly important because they bridge the gap between the real and virtual world.  
• The markers started as utilitarian, minimalist objects (left-above), but I redesigned them to be more photo-realistic so they would fit better as semi-real/semi-fake objects (left-below).  
• Though the marker textures are visually realistic, none of the markers have a one-to-one real life equivalent.  Thus, the markers seem like plausible real world objects while supporting the fiction of The Factory.  
• Physical scale is particularly important when, for example, the control panel marker is handheld for player control, but the factory wall marker is large, making it highly visible from a distance allowing for room-scale AR content.

• The real world isn't divided into levels and stages, therefore a seamless AR experience is the most immersive option.  
• Rather than a menu composed of 2D UI elements, the player navigates the in-game menu by pressing "virtual buttons" on their "Control Panel" AR marker.  
• Instead of segmented levels, The Factory's gameplay elapses over 3 waves within a persistent environment.  Environmental and audio cues delineate each wave.
• Between the 2nd and 3rd waves, the player goes on a company mandated break where they are momentarily placed within a VR beach scene.  This subvert's the player's concept of augmented reality offering an interesting juxtaposition of AR and VR.  

• To ease the transition from designing traditional, purely virtual games, I created a 3D First-Person prototype for the initial game design.  From this prototype, I transitioned Prefabs, scripts, models into the final AR game level.  
• Pros
  • The virtual prototype removed the need to build the project APK and put on the Gear VR headset each time a new feature needed testing.  
  • By designing the environment for a first person perspective, the level scale felt accurate and fleshed out before being put in AR.  
  • The familiar development environment meant the project got off the ground quickly.  
• Cons
  • Designing for a desktop computer meant there were some hardware performance issues after transferring to mobile.  
  • There were a number of code changes and additions that were added to make each platform compatible, but this wasn't too much extra work.  
  • Gameplay metrics favored the virtual prototype, so the AR game felt more difficult and "off."  

• The robotic narrator compels player action by instructing and urging the player to complete tasks.  
• The player is bombarded with hazardous waste projectiles making a passive approach to the game impossible
• Control methods and interactions are intuitive because the player reflexively blocks incoming projectiles with the shield they've been holding from the game start.  
• The narrator walks the player through the tutorial, introducing the rules of the world and how the player can use their real world control panel to influence virtual game objects.