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The paper was published in conjunction with the ArtsIT 2016 conference.
A location-based iPad game where players use augmented reality with street art and location-based riddle solving to explore the city of Aalborg, Denmark. As the game was made in collaboration with Visit Aalborg, the game is targeted at turist families visiting Aalborg, mainly families with small children.
The game’s narrative is very family friendly – an alien is stranded on Earth and needs help to find his alien friends and fuel for his spaceship. Both the alien’s friends and fuel are scattered throughout the city, and the players help him find them by solving riddles that hint about their location. The riddles are given to the players by asking the weird characters in the city’s street art paintings for help (by scanning them with the camera).
The riddles in the game act as an alternative to the boring act of just following a map. The game encourages players to notice their environment by taking inspiration from the traditional children’s game I Spy, where objects are described through hints. In the game, landmarks that are in the players’ view, are described through hints, and when players reach that landmark, they are given a control question about their environment to confirm that they are at the landmark.
After answering the control question, players are given a new hint to another landmark, and this continues until they reach the next street art painting. At each street art painting, players then have the choice to look for alien friends or fuel, and their choice influences the ending of the game – does the alien get to fly back into space, find his friends, or both?
Context: 8th semester Media Technology (Medialogy) project
Finished: May, 2015
Time spent: 3 months, including research and report writing.
Total amount of programmers: 2 (I was the only programmer working on the game itself. The other programmer worked things used in our experiment, such as logging)
Software I used: Unity (C#), Vuforia, Xcode
- Programming:
- Street art scanning (augmented reality using Vuforia).
- Riddle system (GUI programming).
- Narrative choice system.
- Alien companion behavior system (animation triggering).
- General polish of things that give the player feedback.
- Designing and facilitating user tests.
- Video editing.
- Report writing.
Credits
Stephanie G. Nadarajah
Benjamin N. Overgaard
Peder W. Pedersen
Camilla Schnatterbeck
Benjamin Overgaard´s Game Portfolio 