Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
generates virtual fragments around it. The coordinate system of the scene is strongly
defined by the marker. Such a paradigm can be referred to as the pole AR game.
A game scene has a fixed center and all events take place around this point. In
some senses, this concept is very similar to early single-screen arcades and fixed-
shooters games. The players cannot leave their specified location and must fight
all their battles centered around that spot. It looks like technological postmodern-
ism—classical mechanics rethought using modern principles.
The motion of characters and other game pieces can be organized based on several
basic schemes:
•
Towards the center
: All elements try to reach the pole, either to hold this
position or defeat a character situated there. Usually, this occurs in assault-
based action games. Imagine a game with a fortress or a gun turret at the
center and concentric waves of bloodthirsty enemies.
•
Escape the center
: Characters running from the center to the edges of a
gameboard. This occurs in "escape-a-prison" type games. There is a dun-
geon and a lot of prisoners are running out of it and a player has to catch
each of them by tapping on their figures on the screen.
•
Running in circles
: This scheme is mostly used by challenges that take
place on circuits. It can be various types of races. In such competitions, cars,
boats, horses can take part but airplanes look more preferable because you
do not need to check interactions with surface of real objects. Additionally
the scheme can be used by different race-type board games where players
move their game pieces on the circuits.
•
Chaotic
: There is no system or specific location objective for characters.
They move in random directions. Since this is seen in games where there are
many kinds of arena-based death matches and since it is ideal for multiplay-
er modes, several people may control the characters fighting in AR.
The pole AR games have a small creative issue; as long as an AR game scene has
no strict screen frames and a player may see everything constantly changing in their
perspective and vision angle, some procedures cannot be hidden. I'm talking about
the spawning of characters. In a traditional game, enemies may be generated out of
the current window (behind the back of a player, somewhere around the corner of
a 3D map) and then successfully introduced into a main scene. But the AR scene
in most cases cannot use such tricks. Therefore, some other tricks should be inven-
ted on the fly. Usually, authors simply demonstrate characters that come out of the
ground (this is very good for stories about zombies) or dropping down from above
