Building a location-based game in 20 minutes
By: David Rhodes
We just got back from Unite Europe in Amsterdam and had a great time connecting with the many artists and developers building with our Maps SDK for Unity. Thanks to those who stopped by our booth and attended our talk, we were excited to talk with you about how Mapbox brings global location metadata, 3D building models, terrain, satellite imagery, and more to Unity.
During my presentation, I was excited to demonstrate how you can quickly set up a location-based game and customize the environment using the many data layers available on the Mapbox platform. I created a mesh using Mapbox’s digital elevation model to show terrain, then draped a raster map styled in Mapbox Studio on top of the mesh. The raster map was edited to hide labels, but showed roads and some land use areas, such as parks, forests and water bodies. I then added 3D buildings and procedurally populated set dressing, such as trees, rocks, and grass based on land use type in the map tiles.
Using the procedural mesh generation modules that ship with our SDK, I’m able to build a stylized environment for any place in the world by the end of the presentation. Now that we’re back from Amsterdam, I’m excited to share the talk and accompanying demo with you.
Check out the talk below and download the source code of the demo so you can try out the project yourself! You’ll need Unity 5.6.1+ and a Mapbox access token (grab a free token with the SDK here) to use the demo.
Want to use this project with ARKit? Take a look at Jesse’s post for instructions. Don’t forget to let us know what you’ve #BuiltWithMapbox on Twitter!
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