Book Image

Augmented Reality Game Development

By : Micheal Lanham
Book Image

Augmented Reality Game Development

By: Micheal Lanham

Overview of this book

The heyday of location-based augmented reality games is upon us. They have been around for a few years, but the release of Pokémon Go was a gamechanger that catalyzed the market and led to a massive surge in demand. Now is the time for novice and experienced developers alike to turn their good ideas into augmented reality (AR) mobile games and meet this demand! If you are keen to develop virtual reality games with the latest Unity 5 toolkit, then this is the book for you. The genre of location-based AR games introduces a new platform and technical challenges, but this book will help simplify those challenges and show how to maximize your game audience. This book will take you on a journey through building a location-based AR game that addresses the core technical concepts: GIS fundamentals, mobile device GPS, mapping, map textures in Unity, mobile device camera, camera textures in Unity, accessing location-based services, and other useful Unity tips. The technical material also discusses what is necessary for further development to create a multiplayer version of the game. At the end, you will be presented with troubleshooting techniques in case you get into trouble and need a little help.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Augmented Reality Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 3. Making the Avatar

Every game needs some element that denotes the player's presence and point of interaction with the game's virtual world. This element could be a car in a racing game, a worm in a maze game, hands and a weapon in an FPS, or an animated character in an adventure or role-playing game. We will use the latter, an animated character, to denote our player's avatar and location in the game using a third person-perspective camera to showcase the character's movement, around the real world map. This should give our players a good immersive game experience that will make our game fun to play.

Unlike the previous chapters where we spent some time discussing the background and the terminology, in this chapter, we will dive right into Unity and start to add the player avatar. In this entire chapter, we will discuss new game development concepts and cover the following topics:

  • Importing standard Unity assets
  • 3D animated characters
  • Third-person controller and camera positioning
  • Free...