This is one of the first AR games I created when working at PTTRNS.ai and despite being a smaller game it still had plenty of challenges when creating. The game is a small game prototype to use in a shop or event area where several markers are placed for users to scan, when scanned each marker had a separate game or question attached show up. The games we created were a shell game, a rotating tile maze (creating a path) and a pumpkin shooter.

One of the biggest challenges was the stability of the marker, the floor marker (with the pumpkin shooting game) was a large marker with a shiny surface. The shiny surface meant that depending on the light it wasn’t always tracking it the best. We initially also were using Vuforia to scan the markers and switched to ARKit for much more stability, this made a huge improvement. Another big challenge had to do with the UI, there were a lot of separate screens and small popups and I created a system to manage all of these screens with animations. Some screens were very complex and had several layers of animations (screen itself scaling in, animated sprites, text and images fading in) all of which had to be timed. Below is a gif of one of these screens.

The question box animation consists of:

• Sprite mesh animation with bones
• Particles on top of UI
• Text fade in after sprite mesh animation finishes
• Buttons scaling in one by one