gARygeddon

A look at the level in a virtual environment
A screenshot from the game in augmented reality
The laser tower models ordered by their progression level

Inspiration

We combined our passion for tower defense games with a curiosity about the potential of augmented reality (AR) and thus arrived at the idea that became gARygeddon.

What it does

The game has the player use their smartphone camera to view a three-dimensional level, place and upgrade towers along its track, and defend against the enemies trying to make it to the top.

How we built it

We used Blender to create models and Unity to create the game. Most notably, we used Vuforia as our AR engine. The sounds were acquired from the YouTube Studio audio library.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The level is built from modular elements, making it easier to change its layout and opening the door for easily creating new levels.

Challenges we ran into

First we tried using Unity's built in AR packages but it proved too difficult to utilise. Then we moved to Vuforia and it went much more smoothly.

When importing the models and animations from Blender, they had to be adapted to the Unity environment by making wrappers that would transform the model in order to make the animations work as intended. The animations themselves had to be changed because of how blender actually exports the keyframes.

A minor issue was that we lost quite a bit of time on making the level design as the original design had to be adapted for the game engine.