Welcome to the second of our updates about mobile augmented reality (AR) combat videogame Reality Clash and what our developers are doing, to keep you informed about our journey and hopefully offering you some useful insight on the creative process.
If you need a reminder about the game itself, it’s essentially ‘Pokémon Go meets Call of Duty’ for iOS and Android devices – but here’s a link to the first instalment to give you an overview.
Our developers are continuing to prototype the core features of the videogame, and the last couple of weeks have seen geolocation and mapping becoming the focus of research and development.
The team has been evaluating various technologies to ensure that Reality Clash maps are of the highest possible resolution.
Offering highly scalable, high-definition maps is an important feature of the game and we want players to feel engaged with the map screen as much as with the AR gameplay. 3D buildings provide an additional level of detail and depth as you scroll around your local environment to find other players.
The current artwork shown here is still placeholder but you can see how this added depth to buildings greatly improves the perception that you are viewing the world from a high-tech vantage point.
Accurate geo-location is difficult to achieve and can raise problems like those seen in the image above when we cannot accurately overlay buildings on their real-world counterparts.
To help address these problems, the design and art teams are working closely with the technology team to ensure that even if the player does not have an accurate GPS signal they can still play the game and these confusing artefacts do not hamper their enjoyment.
There’ll be more about this in future weeks as we start to reveal our work on the AR interface.
Our team is also working round-the-clock on the Reality Clash trading platform to bring this to our Initial Coin Offering (ICO) funding backers, something we touched on briefly in the last diary. The weapon scarcity and valuation structure is nearing completion, while all weaponry for the first batch release has been completed. Community feedback on the weaponry has been very positive so far. Our backers will soon be able to get their hands on the first batch of weaponry and begin building their arsenal.
Above is one example of an exclusive Elite Assault gun, which will be available on the trading platform from launch.
In our next Dev Diary we’ll be focussing on how we’re prototyping different approaches to blending real and virtual worlds together.