The Veil

An AR ghost hunting game where the real world becomes haunted. Hunt, identify, and exorcise spirits.

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The Veil

Inspiration

I wanted a game to play with friends casually and spontaneously. I think a mobile AR game is a perfect technology to achieve this. Let's make real life a bit entertaining and treat the world as the game world, where you can open up your phone at any time and engage with it.

What it does

The Veil is an augmented reality ghost hunting game built for iPhone.

The Spectral scanner is an app which lets members of The Veil to see paranormal activity. Anomalies and ghosts appear which normally cannot be seen.

Current prototype features include:

  • AR spectral scanner
  • Animated Ecto companion
  • Spectral anomaly detection
  • Custom RealityKit rendering
  • Metal shaders
  • Essence collection
  • Ghost manifestation

How I built it

The project is written in:

  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • ARKit
  • RealityKit
  • Metal
  • GPT-5.6
  • Codex

Codex accelerated development by helping implement RealityKit systems, shader iteration, and implementing things I would otherwise have taken a very, very long time learning to do. With codex, I can quickly experiment with what is possible.

Challenges

Right now, the biggest challenge is on the artistic side of things, generating the entity 3D models needed to play in our 3D world. I was hoping ghosts wouldn't be that hard, but it seems it is much harder than thought to procedurally generate ghosts. I finally resorted to a mesh, which helps.

RealityKit isn't designed for animated multi-layer gel creatures, so I built a custom rendering pipeline using layered entities, Metal shaders, geometry deformation, emission, and transparency.

Building gameplay while simultaneously inventing the rendering technology required many iterations.

What I learned

AR development is much different from traditional game development, where the developer can control everything. I have to expect randomness in the environment. GPT-5.6 and Codex can dramatically accelerate experimentation while still requiring human design decisions and testing.

What's next

This hackathon build is an MVP demonstrating the core gameplay loop.

Next steps include:

  • Multiple ghost types
  • Identification mechanics
  • Cooperative multiplayer
  • Persistent haunted locations
  • Progression and equipment
  • More paranormal events

Built With

  • arkit
  • codex
  • gpt-5.6
  • ios
  • language
  • metal
  • openai
  • realitykit
  • shading
  • swift
  • swiftui
  • xcode
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