The Niantic team, creator of Pokémon Go, did amazing work in creating an iconic map style as a canvas for its game. Here’s how to build a map for location-based games with additional detail like buildings with the Mapbox Unity SDK and Unity.
1 Design in Mapbox Studio
First we used Mapbox Studio to design a base map highlighting roads in dark green with yellow casings, water bodies in a blue texture, and buildings in semi-transparent white. The resulting global map is exposed as a set of tiles on Mapbox servers. Using the Mapbox Unity SDK, I created an imagery module with my custom designed map. This module pulled the tiles and applied them as a texture to a flat rectangle polygon providing the game surface. Here’s the result:
Image may be NSFW.
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2 Place buildings in Unity
To add more depth, I used our SDK for Unity to load building data and extrude polygons, sitting right on top of the map. I created the buildings layer with a Mesh Factory module using “building” as the key. I also added triangulation, height, UV, and texture modules to style them like this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
3 Build your game
At this point the map is ready to customize and build your gameplay on top. Below are a couple of characters I pulled from the asset store and placed on the map.
Download the Mapbox Unity SDK and let me know on Twitter what you’re building.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
