Welcome to the third of our Developer Diaries, keeping you informed on the build progress of Reality Clash, a mobile augmented reality (AR) combat game for iPhone and Android. For this update, we wanted to focus on how we’re prototyping different approaches of blending the real and virtual worlds together.

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.

It sounds obvious, but it quite literally all depends on what is in front of the lens at any given time. As shown in recent Apple keynote demos, a scripted demo on a stage with an empty table offers a perfectly stable environment to place some virtual objects.

However, in Reality Clash we don’t have this luxury, and expect our players to be running around busy environments where objects may suddenly appear in front of them.

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.

This has seen us prototype various approaches to the problem, such as portals that can magically grow in front of the player, offering a glimpse into a virtual world that you can then walk around.

Alternatively, turning the phone into a portable window into a parallel dimension that tries to mirror reality, as well as trying to blend the virtual and real worlds together without any visual FX.

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.

In addition, the team has continued to expand in terms of programming staff and the addition of a UI/UX expert who is currently wireframing the journey through the entire Reality Clash experience.

Meanwhile, our team in Manila continue to build exclusive new weapons for our early ICO backers and competition winners, all of which will start to appear on the online trading platform when it’s launched.

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.

Join Jake for the next edition of the Reality Clash Developer Diaries in two weeks time, here on VRFocus.