UWU or OWO - A WebAR Dating Sim

Title Screen

Inspiration

We wanted to create an immersive, story-driven augmented reality experience. We brainstormed ideas for our storyline and the idea that got all of us excited was the Dream Daddy Dating Simulator as a visual novel style game. The rest of the storyline flowed from that idea.

What it does

The game provides a visual novel style dating simulator, with choices that affect your relationship with the characters you're trying to woo. We enhanced this experience by asking the user to interact with our digital characters in the real world via a WebAR frame. Choices are affirmed with real world objects or marker images that can be printed easily.

How We built it

We used the 8th Wall engine for WebAR, which uses the A-Frame framework for declarative XR entities. We started with the example projects provided by 8th Wall to understand their functionality, and what we could take advantage of with AR for our dating simulator. The rest was building assets, writing our story, setting up the control flow of our game, and running into lots of bugs.

Challenges We ran into

Running into framework bugs, hitting differences between how iOS and Android render AR frames, and cataloguing our story in a way that reflects the elements of immersion meant to occur at points throughout the story were just some of the problems that consumed many hours of our time.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We made friends! We all enjoyed the time we spent together, and we have a really cool and really adorable game to show for our work too. We're really proud that we came out with anything that works. We really solidified the final understanding of what we were building and what its scope could reasonably be midday Saturday, and it worked out really well that we've managed everything we set out for ourselves to accomplish. We had members who had never used version control, two (of three) programmers who had never utilized web technologies before, two designers working to form one cohesive visual style, and we came out with a fully functional WebAR experience that's fun to play with.

What's next for UWU and OWO - A WebAR Dating Sim

Further courting of the scintillating characters UWU and OWO is of course very necessary, and an expansion of the story, the number of choices a player can make, and the kinds of endings a player can finish with would all be awesome to add with more time. Furthermore, better recognition of 3D objects by AR frameworks would greatly improve the consistency of our experience and our ability to make our game fun and easy to play with.