Spooky-Covid19 - An augmented reality based game effect

Inspiration

The pandemic indiced me to make a cool game during the lockdown

What it does

In this game based effect, you have to dodge all coronoviruses you encounter and may your own way out of the havoc caused by the pandemic. This effect is based on a face tracker where you have to tilt your head from side to side to control the movement of the bike. Also make sure you don't stay outside the road for 3 seconds or more. Everybody is bored during the lockdown. So this cool filter is one way you could engage in some fun avtivity adn battle the viruses. ENJOY!!!

How I built it

Gameplay Patch: The gameplay patch is the main patch for simulating the gameplay. It contains the road animation, moving objects and character animation patches. The road animation is used to simulate a running vehicle on a road. It contains about 45 frames of road images which are extracted from a gif found online and are simulated using the Loop animation and transition patches connected to the current frame of the road. The start and end values run from 0-45. The character animation patch is used to control the movements of the character as he moves his way on the road. Here I have used a face finder, face select, face tracker patches in my graph to capture the face of the user and control the character position as the user tilts his/her head side to side. Here I have used a -1 multiplier to turn the character laterally in the direction of the users head during the tilting action. The patches used here are the character position, 3D head (face mesh) rotation and character 3D rotation which are all synchronised with the face tracker.
The character animation also controls besides users movement, that the user shouldn’t cross the width of the road for more than three seconds, the violation of which kills the user by indicating game over. The moving objects patch contols the On/Off, duration and reset parameters of various colliding objects in our interaction. Some of the interacting objects include coronaviruses, trees, street and the cityscape during the night. Some occur on the ground and some in the air.

Challenges I ran into

I had to overcome various challenges like placing and moving the charcter in the 3D space. simulating the road animations, increasing the speed of the gameplay, making the colliding objects appear at randoim intervals of time and of course making the animations and assets, reactive scripting and optimising the effect to be compatible with the instagram platform.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I was able to set the right targets and achieve them. I got to the opportunity to learn to make amazing effects using sparkAR and understand how it can be used to promote a message and engage audiences. I improved my understanding of the 3D geometry and coordinate space.

What I learned

I learned various features and functionalities of SparkAR and its scripting using reactive programming and also 3D model creations using blender and animations with sparkAR.

What's next for Lockdown-Covid19

I would like to involve a blinking feature to enable the bike to jump over obstacles and also increase the frequency of the obstacles in the effect when the user opens his/her mouth indicating danger and add more music effects and better assets to improve the reach.