Launching Conduct AR! 🚀
And Learning to design for augmented reality
This one has been a crazy ride for us. On the eve of the iOS 11 launch we’re releasing our second game as Northplay. Conduct AR! started as an experiment with ARKit, seeing if we could do a port of our original mobile game Conduct THIS!
We couldn’t.
So we threw out everything and started from scratch.
The impending deadline that was the launch of iOS 11 was only a few months away and we were just about to take our first step learning to design for AR. Everything we had assumed was wrong. Time was short and the lessons were many.
Here’s what it looked like in the very beginning.
Learning what makes AR special
As things were progressing we learned that what makes AR special from a game-design perspective is the players ability to be in control of the camera in the game world. Usually AR experiences focus on the wow-effect of the game taking place in your real world setting. However, at the current state of the technology, this is more of a fun side thing than an actual design foundation. AR lets us project games on surfaces around us and with ARKit it has become a good deal more reliable and easy, but it’s still *just* a 3D scene for the game to take place in. We’re not sensing objects or multiple planes. You can’t interact with things on your table or fall off the edge. Maybe in the future, but not yet. And certainly not something you can reliably design for.
No, what’s really interesting is not that the game is taking place on your dinner table (even though that never gets old). It’s that you, the player, is in full control of the viewfinder into the game world. Designing for an AR-only experience meant taking advantage of this freedom.
This makes AR perfectly suited for spatial puzzles were you need to explore a world, look over and around obstacles and keep track of multiple moving objects. We adjusted the core mechanics of Conduct THIS! to fit with this new world-emphasis. None of the levels from Conduct THIS! was portable, and we ended up designing everything from the ground up.
Once we were fairly sure we had a good fit, we announced the game.
Into the west
As we designed content it became clear to us that the game was a drastic departure from the original. With the added emphasis on world exploration we needed to upgrade the fidelity of the graphics and level of detail for the player to explore. Levels were also demanding more vertical movement and we needed a theme to tie it all together. Something that had an epic feel and enabled for trains driving over rickety high suspended bridges. Finding out that Conduct AR! would be an epic old west adventure was the last piece of the puzzle. Everything fell into place after that and the team scrambled to make an interesting wild west world for players to play in. The contrast between the style and fidelity of Conduct THIS! and Conduct AR! was suddently a lot more pronounced.
With the natural deadline of the iOS 11 launch looming, we crunched to get this ready — working closely with Apple and taking suggestions under development to improve controls and UI to make it the best possible showcase for the technology.
One important discovery we made in the last stretch of development was that people had a hard time waving the device around to control the camera while also interacting with elements on screen. Reaching your iPad Pro over the mountain on your table with one hand, while frantically trying to tap a moving train coming out of tunnel with the other, made the game unnecessarily difficult. The solution? We introduced side buttons and a circle cursor that lets you interact with content on screen by pointing your device at it and tapping your thumb. Things you can interact with light up with a color-coded outline matching the actions. This works well on several levels, because it includes the free movement of AR as a control scheme. It made it easier for people to interact with things and it forced them to further explore the world.
Today Conduct AR! has become it’s very own standalone experience and now joins what could rightfully be called the ‘Conduct’- Franchise. It is set in the old west and takes full advantage of the possibilities of AR: making you move around, look over landscapes and solve spatial puzzles. Here’s the launch trailer made purely from game footage taken from an iPhone.
What we’ve learned so far
Building an AR-only experience turned out to be a lot of fun, and very challenging design-wise. I’m going to condense some of these learnings into a future article and possibly a talk, but here’s some quick takeaways:
- AR is not something you apply to a game after the fact. It’s not a coat of technological paint you apply for a gimmick. To take full advantage you need to design for it.
- One of the biggest challenges with designing for AR is the inability of the designers to control the camera. So much of regular entertainment relies on the creators being able to show players where and when to look. This type of orchestrated storytelling is almost impossible when the player has the freedom to control the ‘viewfinder’ of the world. It has massive ramifications for how we communicate in-game events and interfaces.
- Designing interfaces in AR requires you to think carefully about what is ‘in-world’ and what isn’t and how you make vital information available to the player without the ability to hijack the camera.
- We’re just seeing the early usecases of AR. A lot of it is going to be gimmicky and tacked on, but if you truly design for it you can make it exciting and worthwhile.
Get the game directly from the 📲 App Store
Or learn more at 🚂 conductthis.com
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Michael is a Danish designer, entrepreneur & keynote speaker. He runs entertainment development studio Northplay, Pixelresort and design resource platform Apply Pixels.
