Augmented Tabletop

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  A small arena demonstration.

I'm an avid tabletop RPG player, and I've always felt like my tools end up a bit lacking. Either I spend far too much time on a prop that is used once, or a feel like I'm letting players down by not preparing enough.

This app seeks to use ARCore's cross platform technology to give an entire party of people an immersive Tabletop RPG experience, by giving the DM the tools to build interesting settings, and allowing players to move their pieces through it.

As mentioned, I leveraged Google's ARCore and Firebase for most of the heavy lifting. Google recently released Cloud Anchors for ARCore, which lead to the formation of this idea.

Getting everything working to start with proved to be a surprising challenge. A large portion of my work at this hackathon was wrestling with Unity glitches, weird settings, and diving through endless pages saying similar, but contradictory, things.

I'm glad that I was able to try my hand at ARCore for a second time. My first attempt ended somewhat poorly, as the technology was not suited to the goal I had in mind, and lead to an unsatisfactory product. This time though, I was able to make something I can be proud of.

I learned a lot about the backend of multiplayer networks, since the crux of this app is making sure that every player has access to the same board.

Hopefully I can continue developing Augmented Tabletop into a release ready product. I know for a fact that my community, the tabletop RPG community, would absolutely dig an app like this. I also intend to add a community marketplace, to allow the community to share their creative assets and 'scenes' they have made. I can see so many features that would all make this app more enjoyable, but I believe the core product as it stands serves its purpose.

Built With

• arcore
• c#
• firebase
• unity