Niantic’s Pokemon GO might be seen as the poster child for augmented reality (AR) videogames on mobile, but there are plenty of other looking to usurp the title from its podium. Today, Reality Gaming Group has announced the long-awaited arrival of its more ambitious combat experience, Reality Clash, for iOS and Android devices.
Using Apple and Google’s latest ARKit and ARCore technologies, Reality Clash is set in an underground world of cryptocurrencies and hackers, where players can navigate a 3D map to defend key parts of their own real-world town, city or village competing in real-time battles, mine for resources, and build or customise unique guns.
Fights can be team-based, made up of 200 people, or if no players are nearby then a user is able to engage in combat with bot players which are scattered across the map for continuous gameplay opportunities.
“After months of development, our pioneering new game is literally a Reality,” said Reality Gaming Group’s Co-Founder Tony Pearce. “We’ve had thousands of Beta testers providing us with feedback and we’re delighted that we have a game in Reality Clash that is as fun and engaging as it is technically advanced.
“Australia, New Zealand and Denmark are the first territories to see the game go live, and we’ll be rolling out Reality Clash internationally shortly. Let the battles commence!”
VRFocus has been following Reality Clash for a while now, to the extent that over the course of 2017/18, the team produced a series of developer diaries for the site, documenting what the team was working on and what features players could expect to see in today’s launch.
As mentioned, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark will be the first territories to see Reality Clash, with more features and territories to be added on a monthly basis. This is likely to avoid some of the issues Pokemon GO faced when it initially launched, seeing widespread server issues that made the videogame almost unplayable for many weeks.
As further countries are announced and Reality Clash begins to expand its user base, VRFocus will bring you all the latest updates for the title.
SKINS | PATTERNS | DECALS
Finally, with the creation of the weapon completed, the item must be tested and then animated for use within the Armoury app and, later, in the Reality Clash app.
Nearly every modern mobile videogame will utilise a BaaS (Backend as a Service) to allow the developers to remotely communicate with each other and work on the code. Reality Clash utilises this technology in many ways and we want to explain a few of these to you.
A/B Testing
AR technology has come a long way in recent years, but as with any technology based on cameras, it’s as easy to break as it is to make it look awesome.
As such we’ve been spending a lot of time exploring visual approaches to blending worlds together in order to evaluate what will work best in-game.
All of these techniques bring their own advantages and disadvantages and we will continue to iterate on these approaches to find one that can offer the best gameplay solution, alongside a visual approach that will keep players immersed in the game.
Topics for future updates will include the challenge of dealing with GPS location on mobile devices and how inaccurate it can sometimes be, plus our aforementioned approach to UI/UX and the staged approach to game development.