Quenching the thirst of a challenging project, I was provided SpotaGoGo in the month of November in 2016. The project has been created in Unity and is now available both on iOS and Android platforms.

Overview of ‘SpotaGoGo’

SpotaGoGo is a scavenger hunt game that engages and motivates people to discover sponsored locations and promotions. Players search out locations on a map and use the app’s Augmented Reality programming to recognize and capture 3D avatars at each stop and can share their experience on Social Media.

Working Process of ‘SpotaGoGo’

The client had shared the project requirement document with the screens and functionalities that he required. I teamed up with the designing team to get the designs approved by the client on the basis of his requirements.

Alongside, I worked with the server team to get the required APIs for the game, starting with user registration which included Standard Email Registration, Facebook, and Twitter Registration. The client also required Game Center Registration but the plan was discarded owing to iTunes Policies.

Challenges Under AR App

• The project came with various new implementations and challenge, the first challenge being Twitter APIs integration. I integrated the Pin-based authorization for Twitter.
• The game has a feature that any new promotions/locations sub-games can be added to it from time to time that are available for a specific period of time only to nearby users from the sponsored location. This brought in the requirement of using Asset Bundles in the game. There is an Admin Panel that keeps records of all the games, their availability dates, and the registered users.
• The sub-games consist of various locations where avatars need to be captured in order to complete the game. Vuforia has been used as AR Tool. Capturing all avatars entitles a user to a grand prize. The sub-games were either indoor games that used a static indoor map to show the locations with the avatar images or Outdoor games where google map was shown with all the locations that the user needs to go to, his present location been shown with a marker. The avatars are gray-scaled till you capture the location. In the indoor games, there is a feature of Exhibitors directory where the details of the exhibitors of the locations are displayed.
• One of the challenges was to add the database files of Vuforia in the asset bundle. The vuforia database unity package comes with .dat and .xml file. The .dat file cannot be added to Asset Bundle. The easy way is to change the extension of .dat to .xml for asset bundle and upon download, use it as .dat. The next challenging task is to load the dataset at runtime which was completed in the timeframe after a lot of research.

The user can share the avatar captured on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter API for sharing a high-quality image along with the status in Unity was challenging part. You can see various questions on Stack Overflow regarding the same with no satisfying answer.

SpotaGoGo – Ready to Go

Research of a few days completed the task successfully with an updated answer on Stack Overflow! There is also a feature of competitions in the sub-game where users can form a team to compete for the Grand Prize.

Weekly releases were sent to the client for approval and his feedback was processed the next week along with the weekly task of that week completing the milestones in the speculated time.

The client made various changes in his original requirements which were delivered up to his expectations. We had intensive discussions on features and suggested him the best possible solutions which he agreed upon. We have always been available on skype and mail to answer his queries immediately.

Till now, we have successfully administered two games, 1 indoor and 1 outdoor with a very positive feedback from the users.

It was a great project to increase the skill set.

Download on:

Android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spotagogo

iOS

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spotagogo/id1209350172