Latitude Heroes

Conquer the world facing epic bosses in this geo-based adventure!

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Inspiration

Our passionate gamer Philip has a girlfriend who started to complain about him spending most of his free time in his room to fight bosses in his hardcore videogames. So Philip decided to scale them up, bring them alive in the real world, to be able to go on vacations and trips around the world without getting bored.

What it does

This project consists of an AR application that brings gamification to the real world using Geospatial Creator with Unity. Players can fight bosses around the world, placed in points of interest like monuments and important sites. Three main bosses have been accurately developed for the specific locations in which this project takes place, but the vision would be to place many more points of interest around the whole Globe. From this point of view, Latitude Heroes falls within the range of Travel and Local discovery category as well.

Two of these boss fights take place in Prague, our beautiful city in the hearth of Europe. The last one takes place right in the centre of Manhattan, because we really wanted to launch this experience in the centre of the world.

  • By Prague's National Musuem, in the famous Venceslao Square, the user will fight a horde of evil goblins spawning from a portal in the sky, who foolishly try to rob the Museum of its precious art pieces. It is possible to recover the stolen treasures as the goblins try to fly away riding fireworks, just by tapping on the screen to shoot at them and possibly make them pop! Using a catapult, the user will also have to close the portal by destroying the three key-stones in the sky.

  • By the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in the Karlín district, an unexpected steampunk door shows a different interior of the church, where some dangerous robot sentinels come from, trying to get close to the user and deliver damage. But the main foe is a weird-looking eye appearing right in the central rose window, shooting beams towards the user. These beams must be physically avoided and the Eye must be destroyed to complete the experience.

  • By the Flatiron Building, a giant kraken-like monster is attacking the city, and the only way to defeat it is shooting at its main core, while avoiding to get hit by flying debris that the creature is throwing with its tentacles. Such debris can be targeted and neutralized mid-air to avoid damage.

In all the experiences, a weapon levelling system is implemented: the player starts with a weak weapon, gradually upscaling (until triple-shot) during the fight.

Important note: Throughout the design process, user safety considerations have been put first, defining the specific area within which the experience needs to be faced. Possible dangerous places have been avoided for this experience, ensuring a safe use of the app.

How we built it

This project was made in Unity using Universal Render Pipeline and Geospatial Creator. The 3D assets implemented are often public domain assets downloaded from libraries like Sketchfab, improved or adapted to the scenarios. In other cases, the graphic assets have been designed and realized specifically for the idea to develop, or bought online. Adobe Mixamo's animation library has been used for some animations.

Challenges we ran into

Testing has for sure been one of the main challenges, expecially when it comes to far locations, because a significant amount of time must be saved for that, more than once. But the physical movement included in the development of this app has perfectly embodied the spirit of this challenge: location scouting was also one the most exciting steps: selecting places, discarding others, finding out where the Geospatial API work better thanks the presence of more data, and then accurately studying the morphology of the selected location, without neglecting details such as obstacles and variable elements that could differ from the API data (such as vegetation and parked cars).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the aspects that we have tried to never belittle, and on which we have based the foundations of each brainstorming, concerns the significance of the selected places: our intention is to never harm these places value, but to integrate it with an added value, even if these AR experiences fall within the field of entertainment. We believe we have achieved this goal, increasing the attraction to places that, possibly, may also lack tourist attraction, and therefore increase their value. No less important than this matter, of course, has been the alread-mentioned user safety.

What we learned

We certainly improved our skills of integrating augmented reality in the external world, and had a lot of fun in doing so.

What's next for Latitude Heroes

  • In our vision, this project has the potential to extend to a global and widespread scale, creating boss-fights at many known or unknown points of interest in the world. In some cases, the experience can turn into a real adventure, for example when a point can only be reached on foot. People's holiday will never be the same again, with our app.
  • We want to introduce a multiplayer ranking system that allows you to see the best players who have defeated each boss, or how many have failed while trying and - why not? - introduce the ability to play alongside other users.
  • In a potential co-creation system, users could then place new boss-fights in location they know, eventually allowing a true capillary coverage of the world.

Credits

Some of the 3D assets used in this project have been downloaded from Sketchfab and used under the CC BY 4.0 license. These credits are reported also in the demo video of the app:

SFX and music from Pixabay & Zapsplat

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