Welcome to the third of our ‘Developer Diaries’, keeping you informed about the progress of Reality Clash and the latest updates from our developers on the game.
For this developer update we wanted to focus on how we’re prototyping different approaches of blending the real and virtual worlds together.
AR technology has come a long way in recent years but as with any technology based on cameras, it’s as easy to break as it is to make it look awesome. It all depends on what is in front of the lens at the time. As shown in the recent Apple keynote demos, a scripted demo on a stage with an empty table offers a perfectly stable environment to place some virtual objects. However, in Reality Clash we don’t have this luxury, and expect our players to be running around busy environments where objects may suddenly appear in front of them.
So we have started spending a lot of time exploring visual approaches to blending worlds together to evaluate what will work best for Reality Clash.
This has seen us prototype various approaches to this problem, such as portals that can magically grow in front of you, offering a glimpse into a virtual world that you can then walk around. Alternatively, turning your phone into a portable window into a parallel dimension that tries to mirror reality, as well as trying to blend the virtual and real worlds together without any visual FX.
All of these bring advantages and disadvantages and we will continue to iterate on these approaches to find one that can offer the best gameplay solution alongside a visual approach that will keep players immersed in the game.
Testing out the portals
In addition, the team has continued to expand with more programmers and the addition of a UI / UX expert who is wireframing the flow through the entire experience and as we soon reach the end of our pre-production period and kick off full production.
The team in Manila continue to build exclusive new weapons for our early backers and competition winners all of which will start to appear on the online trading platform when this is launched soon.
Competition winner’s gun seen above!
Topics for future updates will include the challenge of dealing with GPS location on mobile devices and how inaccurate it can sometime be, and also our approach to UI / UX, and the staged approach to development.