Inspiration
With the ban on several chinese apps by the government of India it opens up a whole new marketplace for Indian Developers. In India game development is yet to take off, Augmented reality is an upcoming field for development , with a huge Indian market yet to be explored. With the App ‘Chimera’ I address several of these issues, starting with becoming a social gaming platform where users can interact with people around the world , play games in several different modes including single player, multiplayer , simple 3D , Augmented Reality and much much more to come.
What it does
Basic Design and workflow of games:
Bowling Game Bowling games currently have 3 modes: Single Player, Pass and Play 2 Player, Single player AR (beta). It has been built using Unity 3D engine, and C# programming language. It uses Unity Physics and Finger swipe gestures for seamless experience.
Whack A Mole This game is currently available in two modes, AR and 3D. In 3D mode you get a 3x3 grid of moles popping up from the ground from 2 minutes and you try to hit the most that you can. As the game goes on the speed of these spawns keeps on increasing. In the AR mode you get the same game in ‘user defined image target’, so you click a picture of any image in your surrounding that qualifies as a good image target and the game will then be placed on it.
Sandbox Sandbox is an open world game and is designed to retain users for a long term. It allows the user to explore the virtual world, collect resources and build structures and customize it. The game has “portals” as well which allows users to play mini games and earn points.
How I built it
Majorly I built it with technologies like Unity 3D engine and C# programming language.
Challenges I ran into
Initially for the whack-a-mole game, while shifting it from non-AR mode to AR mode, I was considering global coordinates of the holes, but in AR version the coordinates were different. I solved it by referencing the local position of objects.
Vuforia 9.3 did not have user-defined image targets support so I had to switch back to Vuforia 8.4. The facebook-SDK had issues with OpenSSL on windows platform. I ran into a lot of issues while optimizing sandbox for the android platform, which included rendering a smaller world, only instantiating blocks that are visible.
What I learned
- I learned many new things like working with Vuforia and Resolving issues with Facebook-SDK on Windows platform.
- It was my 3rd time using C# programming language and I had lots of fun and learnings while using it.
- To make the game more interactive I added my own custom made music created using bosca ceoil software.
Applications
Chimera as of right now hosts , three games :-
- Sandbox - Our long term sandbox game allows users to walk around in an open world environment while building and destroying the terrain , going on quests and exploring the vast world
- Bowling - A fun sports game of bowling which you can either play around by yourself or have a friend with you to play in the pass and play mode.
- Whack-A-Mole - This game is a brand new take on the conventional game , with our game we bring a 3D as well as an augmented reality experience where you can place your base on any real world image and play a quick game of whack a mole
Social Hub : The application currently has a world chat feature where you can interact with all the users, with a custom chat room feature coming soon. Users can login using facebook or email id.
What's next for Chimera
In the future additions, I plan to:
- Allow Indian developers to host their games on our platform and leverage our existing customer base.
- Bring in games of different genres like education and social welfare, thereby increasing our audience.
- Bring in promotional AR games that endorse products or events thus starting game promotional media through our platform.
- Bring in real time multiplayer games with video call feature for users to interact and play hence providing a more immersive experience.
- Add truly immersive open world multiplayer experience for the sandbox game.
- Create a game creator software where the users can create basic games and host it there only.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.