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

Summary


In this chapter, you were introduced to some fundamentals about GIS, mapping, and GPS. This basic knowledge helped us define some terminologies for working with and loading the Google Maps API in Unity. We then added a map to the game but decided the quality was lacking. This led us to building a tile map system for the game map. After which, we took a quick break to introduce a console debugging tool called CUDLR. CUDLR helped us debug a fundamental piece of our game and find the player's location via GPS. This allowed us to finish out the chapter by adding GPS to our game using the GPS location service.

Now that we have the fundamentals established, we can now get into more hands-on game development. The following chapter will be a whirlwind introduction to adding a fully rigged character to our scene and also cover mobile touch input, free look cameras, and how to access the device's motion sensors.