DracARys is an augmented reality application where users can raise a dragon from an egg to an adult with a variety of interactions such as feeding, petting and socialising.
As the dragon grows it will develop its own unique appearance, behavior and abilities entirely dependent on your personal interactions with it, eventually reaching full adulthood, ready to explore the outside world.
Video Showcase
DracARys works using Niantic’s Lightship ARDK and features fully fledged AR interactions with the environment around, allowing the dragon to be behind objects and around others in real time.
DracARys currently has over 100K downloads on Android and iOS.
I joined DracARys on the later end of development, but helped integrate audio, bug fixing and visual aspects that still needed refinement or were listed as polish tasks.
Audio Integration
Working with Audio supplied by Factory Studios, I created various Sound Managers to utilise FMOD’s Banks, Reverb Zones and Events to add life to the dragon’s animations through sound effects.
The reverb zones were utilised in order to play sound effects as if they are in a different environment, and are changed when the dragon is indoors, outdoors or in their cave environment. Accompanying this, the sound effects also change with the dragon’s personality to give each dragon its own tics, responses and character.
Crack Shader
While I joined the project further into development, I did have the pleasure of creating a crack for the egg the dragon hatches from.
Inside of Amplify, I added the crack through utilising a crack texture, and lerping a CrackAmount through the crack’s mask and normals. This amount then shows a black crack through the mask and adds this on top of the egg’s current textures to create a crack that develops in steps over time.
Show Dragons
DracARys included the show’s dragons appearing in-game around the same time as the episodes featuring them. With the dragons being generated, I scaled them correctly in comparison to generated player dragons which allowed dragons such as Vhagar to tower over the player and the environment.
This included refining the existing UI and creating a sense of mystery with the Westeros dragons by having their stats become ???. This was also utilised as a countermeasure for any player dragons with missing parameters and displayed their stats as ???.
