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

Mobile development woes


If you were paying attention, you may have noticed early on that our Splash scene text wasn't sizing correctly when deployed to the mobile device. The reason we left that issue until now is to make the point about designing your UI to be screen-size independent.

The bane of any mobile developer is supporting the almost endless variety of screen sizes in a consistent manner. On some platforms, this requires developing multiple resolution images/sprites for the UI elements. Fortunately, the Unity UI system has a few nice options for screen-size scaling that should work for most of our platforms. Keep in mind, however, that not all solutions are 100% perfect, and there is a possibility of scaling artifacts on some platforms.

In order to fix our current UI screen rendering woes, we will configure the Canvas Scaler component on all our UI canvases. Perform the following directions to configure the Canvas Scaler:

  1. Open any of the game scenes that have UI elements (Map, Catch...