September, 6 a.m., San-Francisco, – it’s the last chance to enter the iOS 11 launch line before time expires. We must make the deadline, our whole team is sleeping on the other side of the planet, and a “Build Failed” message is facing me from my screen. How did I manage to get into this situation? Well, let me tell you about this.
We’ll Follow the Plan
We were experimenting with AI and drawings identification and decided to make a VR god simulator game. All of us at Luden.io love Black & White to death; we love to draw in VR with our hands and everyone thought that it was a cool idea to control the little men on earth. You draw a rain symbol in the sky — it starts to rain, doesn’t that sound cool?
No Time to Explain
To make the story complete I should mention that we have been working in the VR field for quite a while, but we’ve all agreed that AR is more interesting. In June at WWDC, Apple announced that ARKit would be released in the autumn of 2017, and it took us five minutes to decide that we must jump on that train. What were we doing during those five minutes of decision making? Finding out if Unreal Engine supported ARKit.
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Rethinking the game’s systems so late in the game posed many new design challenges. We tried to keep everything we had made during the past month in the game, including animations, scenes, and transitions. To receive such a hybrid, we added selection buttons to the key moments of the game. All the rest of the management was just pressing on the little guys.
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More Tech
The game also lacked wow-factor. We knew how to solve this issue, but we were afraid to do so because of the tight deadlines. However, after we finally gained some courage, we decided to take the risk anyway and added the ability to recognize real-world objects in the game. Just imagine how cool it would be if a virtual tribe reacted to a dog from the real world. Or if the tribe wants to eat, you can show them a banana and they will receive a virtual banana in the game. We implemented the Apple CoreML system to the game using a self-made plugin in Unreal Engine.
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Gamescom
We performed playtests as quickly as possible prior to catching a plane to Gamescom 2017. The interactions did their job and it was possible to start polishing the game. The wow-effect from object recognition also worked as smooth as butter. It was a truly new experience for the player. We had to show the game to the journalists with our fingers crossed, in the hope that it would not crash. We were very lucky that everything went smoothly and, our friends from VRFocus even believed the game was already stable, but we knew that was far from the truth.
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Besides meeting with journalists at Gamescom, we had one more important task to take care of — speak with the Unreal Engine team. With the release of iOS 11 just prior, Apple had changed the format a bit. While we were able to test the game on our devices, we could not load it into TestFlight, which we needed to begin Apple’s review process. After a chat with the Unreal Engine team and some follow-ups, the problem was solved.
PAX
The game became better and better each day, and our hands were not shaking as much when we demonstrated it at PAX. We even had some time to add an option of changing the size of game objects in the same way we zoom photos on iPhone. It was super funny when people discovered this and made the little guys grow to the height of the Washington State Convention Center, where PAX Seattle 2017 was held.
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A week after PAX, the launch date for iOS 11 was announced. For us, this meant that the game should be submitted no later than September 15th. We were so nervous that it seemed that we would be able to make it all on time, we even walked through the interfaces and made hints about the possibilities of the game in the form of quests in the upper right corner. Then the player could simply do any crazy things that they wanted to or just perform fun quests like “smash the tree with a lightning”.
In addition, we realized that lighting in different rooms is very diverse, so it’s important to add a quality tracking indicator for the player and give recommendations on how to improve tracking. Otherwise, the player will think that there’s a bug in the game, and that’s why the entire 3D scene is moving somewhere it is not supposed to move to.
Launch
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On the day of the launch, we thought everything was good. I was in San Francisco, and the guys from Moscow and Cyprus had created a build. Since they were very tired from this 3-month race, they collected the final build and went to sleep. I saw the sunrise, loaded the build to iTunes and immediately got rejected.
You know, there are some special words in Russian that can help to express the intention to solve a complex problem when it is unclear how to solve it. Using those words, clearing up the cache, and rebuilding the editor I was able to create the necessary build in three hours. iTunes Connect approved it. I think we made the deadline with only a few hours left at that moment.
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After the iOS 11 launch, our game was right on the main page of Apple’s App Store. We were crazy happy and hyped about this! A few different fun surprises followed later, such as Apple’s award in the end of 2017, but those are stories for another day.
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Conclusions
So what conclusions can be made based on this story?
– It is very important to show the quality of the AR tracking and explain how to improve the tracking in AR to the player so that it is more comfortable to play.
– Most players expect AR objects to be interactive.
– The gaming session in AR should be short, about 5 to 10 minutes, because carrying the device for long is not very comfortable and the battery charge will not withstand longer sessions.
– It is better to build a game based on interaction of virtual or real objects than make a massive scene.
– New technologies, such as object recognition and light estimation, can attract players. They like everything interesting and technological.
– Be careful when experimenting with new technologies. Our custom recognition system recognized the journalist’s cat as a dog and as a result received an average rating.
– With Marketplace, you can build a prototype of the project very quickly. Use it.
– Run playtests — the sooner the better. Players perceive the game differently to what we, developers, do.
– Communicate with the engine team. They want to help you if they can.
– Make games you love. Otherwise each obstacle on the way to launch will give you an excuse to give up.
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Source: Unreal Engine