fAiRy is an Augmented Reality game using Microsoft HoloLens. In this game, the player will use the latest XBOX S wireless controller to help the little girl to follow the path made with books and collect light orbs, and finally become a fairy and disappear.

Role: Game Designer, Gameplay Programmer

Time: 2 weeks

Platform: Microsoft Hololens

The Game Design

 Over the two-week development, I work as the game designer and programmer in my team. The design part was much harder than I expected at first since we have to combine and balance both the real and virtual parts into the game. Also, to use more real space, the game has to lead the player to walk around and look in different angles. 

To tackle these difficulties, I did much research on the level design of different 3D-platformer games, especially Super Mario 3D World. 

To lead the player walk around and look in different angles, I designed the path as an S shape with different heights for different parts. By using this landscape, we managed to lead the player to look in different angles to find a good position to jump over the gaps.

The Footlight Lane scene from Super Mario 3D World inspired me to introduce the virtual bridge to connect the real parts.  My second thought behind using this effect is that we "bridge" both of the real and the virtual worlds.

The Technical Parts

The technical parts within this game can be divided to two parts: HoloLens calibration and the Visual.

 For calibration, we make a virtual version of the game with cubes in Unity first. Then we calibrate the world by moving the virtual world match the real table macroscopically. Then we adjust the positions of books by matching them to the virtual cubes. 

We tend to use other advanced tools to calibrate, such as Vuforia and HoloLens spatial mapping. But they both have obvious flaws for our game, and it turned out the old way is the easiest way to achieve a relatively decent result.

For visual part, we used massive particle effects to create the feeling of a sweet fairy tale. For the bridge effect, I wrote a new shader based on Dissolve and Vertex Distance.

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