Hold on to your butts. Space Invad-AR, our very own world scale AR game, is now available for download in the iOS app store; and it’s open source so you can use it as a starting point to build your own games. In it, you’re a UFO pilot racing through your city and searching for your lost alien buddies, all while trying your hardest not to destroy any buildings or landmarks.
This room-scale AR experience was a blast to create. We built this game in prep for GDC 2018 to showcase our Maps SDK for Unity, which allows developers to anchor their games with real-world vector data and points of interest (or POIs).
Building the game map
The city maps in Space Invad-AR are real. We pulled in our global map of vector data to produce maps for UFOs to traverse. We created a few different prototypes of game maps seen from different perspectives: one where you could play at street level, walking by buildings that tower over you, and another where you could play from a bird’s-eye view, flying high above a tiny cityscape below. We eventually landed on something in the middle — a scale that lets you fly by building tops while observing individual POIs on the ground. Players can also raise or lower their device to make minor altitude adjustments.
Incorporating points of interest
POI data allows developers to introduce unique game logic into the experience. We style our lost aliens differently depending on where they spawn. You might find an alien near a restaurant eating a hamburger, or one in a park relaxing on a bench. We also customized player feedback messages based on nearby POIs. If your UFO accidentally runs into Washington Square Park in New York City, you might get a message telling you “Oh no, you just destroyed Washington Square Park!” Players get similar messages about restaurants, monuments, museums, stores, and other POIs throughout the map.
Adding custom styles
After building the game map, it was time to layer in some style. You can use Studio to choose from some of our pre-packaged map styles or create your own custom-styled maps. To style the buildings, use our default building texture library. We assigned pastel colors to building features randomly — the bright colors stand out against the relatively subdued gray streets and green public parks below.
Straight to the source (code)
Download our project source code to get a closer look at Space Invad-AR. To build your own game with real-world location data download our Maps SDK for Unity and give it a test drive.
Here comes Space Invad-AR was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.