Portal_Defense

Inspiration

I've been passionate about immersive reality and video games for years. With this game, I set out to modernize a classic video game using augmented reality.

What it does

It's a tower defense game that takes advantage of the player's physical space. As the action takes place in the real environment, the player is invited to move around in his or her own space and experience the heart of the action. The use of augmented reality makes it possible to re-imagine the game's mechanics - for example, the placement of turrets according to their range becomes an easy-to-understand geometric puzzle.

How we built it

The game is built on Unity using Meta's XR SDKs.

Challenges we ran into

I worked alone on the project and it is my first game, so the difficulties were numerous and concerned the whole scope of development.

What we are proud of

I'm happy with the result, as it marks my first foray into both Unity and game development. Despite my initial lack of experience, I successfully implemented a substantial portion of the planned features for this hackathon.

What we learned

Thanks to that, I learned a lot about Unity, C#, gameplay design, haptic feedback, audio, etc.

What's next for Portal_Defense

The game's current format doesn't represent its real ambition. I'd like to add city-builder mechanics to the player's spatial environment.

Alongside this, I'd add resource exploitation mechanics, where players would have to find these resources, build buildings to exploit them and take care of transporting them. For example, he might have to physically fetch them, or extract them by hand, to heighten immersion. He will then have to build logistics chains using walls and other spatial anchors.

The tower defense part could become a temporary mode where the player defends his base.

The addition of power ups (slowed down time, doubled turret capacity, etc.) is also envisaged.

Finally, the addition of a multiplayer mode could be interesting, especially by exploiting the shared anchors technologies available from Meta. This would enable several players physically present in the same place to share the same virtual space and collaborate.