Playing God

A simulated battleground AR game where you get to decide which side wins by playing god, moving soldiers or giving them weapons, even killing them. This game has been made as part of the Aarhus Cultural Game Jam, with cultural inspiration from the 1853 painting Rytterkampen ved Aarhus den 31. maj 1849 and adressing the EU value of equality.

The game simulates the battleground scenario from the painting with Denmark against Prussia, into your set up space, be it a living room, bedroom or outside. 

AR Implementation

AR is implemented in our project through passthrough, where you scan your surroundings before the game starts and set up furniture and other obstacles as either walkable surfaces or obstacles that the soldiers will move on or avoid. Then as you play you can see the soldiers move on the actual furniture in your set up space. 

We had some technical challenges with AR as the runtime navmesh of the room did not always work and the soldiers could sometimes not move at all and sometimes they were all over the walls and the ceiling of the virtual space. We managed to fix this by refactoring some of our code so the mesh didn't require the explicit game objects that were used, instead any game object could use it as a surface.

Interaction in the game is done via hand gestures, where you can hover your hand over soldiers and menus and with a hand-ray interaction and a pinching motion perform actions, such as pressing menu buttons, picking up the soldiers, giving them weapons or killing them.

Game Experience 

Based on user evaluation from play-testing and feedback from the EXPO, our game has satisfied our goals of creating a fun and interactive game that has no gamebreaking bugs and incorporates the environment in a fun way. We wanted to make the game as close to an actual game instead of making it an experience with some gameplay elements and we do think we succeeded in that.     

Most people who tested the game stated that the thought it was fun and felt powerful during gameplay. They also felt quite connected to the game and concentrated during gameplay. Our average rating out of 5 stars was 3.83 for both the game concept and gameplay.

Credits

Designer, Artist, Storyteller: Patrekur Agnarsson

Crafter, Gamemaster: Aimo Hirvonen

Painting: Rytterkampen ved Aarhus den 31. maj 1849, Jørgen Valentin Sonne, 1853, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum

Music: 
Ride into battle by Dongnguyet -- https://dongnguyet.itch.io/ride-into-battle
Soft Piano by Royalty Free Music -- Soft Piano - 100 BPM | Royalty-free Music - Pixabay

Sound effects:
Ambient battle noise: swords and shouting by pfranzen -- https://freesound.org/s/192072/
Death sound(male) by Replix -- https://freesound.org/s/173126/
Scream 01 by adriancalzon -- https://freesound.org/s/219858/