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

Saving the game state


Our game currently doesn't save any state, but until now we haven't needed it. The player's location was directly accessed from their device's GPS, and the monsters around them were spawned by our makeshift monster service. However, we want our players to hunt down, catch, and collect monsters or other items as part of the game. In order to do this, we need to provide persistent storage in the form of a database. Otherwise, when the player turned off the game, all their collected items would be gone. Games running on a mobile device are particularly susceptible to getting shut down or crashing inadvertently, which means we need a robust storage solution.

If you do a search on the Unity Asset store for database, you will see plenty of free and paid options. Yet, we will use an open source alternative from GitHub called SQLite4Unity3d available at https://github.com/codecoding/SQLite4Unity3d. This package is an excellent wrapper for SQLite, a great cross-platform relational...