Dragon Hunter

In my ICS 486: Virtual and Augmented Reality Programming class, we were tasked with working on two separate projects, with one being on the VR side and the other being on the AR side. This is the project my groupmates and I created for the Augmented Reality project that we titled Dragon Hunter. Dragon Hunter is essentially an augmented reality game where there are dragons that spawn in the augmented reality environment and the goal of the user is to shoot the rocket launcher projectiles given to them at the randomly spawning, moving dragons to kill all of them, and the score recorded (at the time of this project, we decided on a max of 10) is the indication of their success. Sound was proximity-based so you can hear how close and which side the dragon was coming from. It is different from your normal game in the sense that it is augmented reality, meaning that it uses your real world environment as the background for the game, so it was definitely a new experience, but it was a very fun project to work on once we got the ball rolling.

In my group, I was responsible for distributing tasks throughout our team. I just tried to make sure everyone had their own part to work on, and we each held each other accountable to finishing those parts that we were assigned. If we could not get something done, we let the other group members know so that they could take a crack at it to see if they could figure it out. I also helped organize meetings with my teammates when necessary to get progress updates, work on the project together, or any other miscellanous details that we needed to attend to. In terms of my individual focuses in the project, I focused on collision detection, projectile firing via fire button (user touch input), bug fixes, background sounds, and overall UI. My main focus was probably collision detection as that is one of the main points of our game, to detect when the rocket projectile collides with the dragons, so that the game can respond accordingly to this action. It was a challenge at first, but after much trial and error, we got it to work and our group was very satisfied with our product.

Over the course of the entire experience, I learned the basics of what it is like to work in an augmented reality environment. It is quite different from most projects I have worked on so far to this point as I have mostly stuck to web development related programming, but this was certainly a new experience. It was also my first time working with XCode and using my iPhone to deploy the application so that I could actually play the game. Usually I would just use my laptop and run everything there as I needed to, but working with multiple platforms in this case added a new dynamic into the equation which was quite interesting to learn about. If I had the chance in the future, I would like to work on another Augmented Reality project as this project was one that I quite thoroughly enjoyed due to its uniqueness and all of the new things that I picked up throughout the span of working on this project.

Here is the link to our code repository, and here is the final video submission for our project (You will likely have to download the video first so that you can watch it). Below is a screen capture of what the game looks like.