anymon!

What it does

Anymon is an AR mobile game similar to Pokemon Go where players can "capture" any object they point their camera at! These objects (say, a water bottle), turn into monsters and gain their own unique moveset (e.g. a water bottle will have water related moves). Players battle their anymon against each other to earn rewards. Battles are decided by science! For example, if a water bottle anymon goes against a book anymon, the bottle anymon will have the advantage; subsequently, the game will explain the chemistry of how the water breaks down the book's chemical bonds.

Players will also have to choose their moves carefully in this game: when I was playtesting, I had a lot of fun deciding which moves will be most effective against other anymon, especially when they are both unique objects! The gameplay also borrows a lot of the gameplay loop and fun systems from the original Pokemon games, so it's actually a very engaging experience.

Other important gameplay features

Anymon can be released into the wild to passively fight other anymon in the background. However, other nearby players can capture those anymon if they defeat it in a battle.
More rare and unique real-life objects will create stronger anymon. This encourages players to go out, explore the world, and be curious!
There's a fully functioning in-game economy to keep the game balanced. When your anymon takes damage, you will have to spend coins to heal it. You can gain coins by defeating other anymon.

Inspiration

AI has been gaining stigma of ruining creativity, imagination, and learning. I wanted to make something that improves all 3, especially for kids. I also wanted to develop a game that was fun for myself to play, and that actually came out to be true, as I found myself enjoying this a lot!

Challenges I ran into

This was a solo project so it was pretty difficult for me. I needed to feed camera data into an image generator, then feed that into a image to 3D model conversion AI. This seemed simple but this specific pipeline was throwing a lot of difficulties at me. But eventually, I fixed this. Another big issue is that I was planning on using Redis for multiplayer. However, I was having trouble setting it up, so my project was only functional on localhost now, but now I got it working on Vercel through Redis.