Tony Penguin Pro Skater

Inspiration

We tried our best to think of an interactive effect that we could do with Spark AR that would be fun for the user and encourage them to share the video/picture itself. We explored our team's likes and skateboarding came up. An endless runner seemed to fit that idea naturally. And we skinned it in a silly cool 2000s skateboarding vibe.

The rainbow text was a throwback to the Word Art text of the early 2000s.

The penguin is there because he's cute, silly, and we needed someone on that skateboard. :)

What it does

You tilt your phone to move the penguin player left and right and tap the screen to jump. You avoid the obstacles as long as you can and try to reach a totally gnarly awesome radical high score!

How I built it

Using Spark AR and Blender.

Challenges I ran into

Keeping under that 4mb limit was tough. In the end we were able to fit it under 2mb but that took a lot of crunching of the textures and shortening of the music.

It didn't take long for any 3D model to push past the size limit so that was a struggle.

The scripting was also a new paradigm for us as we haven't done reactive coding before. The patch editor was also interesting to learn.

About 90% of the making of this was reading up on SparkAR's documentation for scripting and patches.

Last but not least, trying to keep in mind all of Facebook's policies as we develop it. We found out about the instruction issue at the last minute rather than us doing custom text.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That we were able to produce something playable for the hackathon that was actually fun and what we envisioned. That's thanks to the power of SparkAR's Patch Editor. It can do a lot once you understand it.

What I learned

SparkAR's Patch System makes it possible to get by with minimal coding. And how to interact with objects that makes sense in an AR space. You can't predict where the player will always be so we had to make it make sense from several angles.