What is Round Up?
Roundup is a collaborative game that mixes augmented reality and physical interaction where the goal is to herd sheep and protect them from getting eaten by wild foxes. I worked on this project in the first period of the autumn semester of 2022 in the course Advanced Graphics and Interaction at KTH. The objective of the game is to herd sheep into a safe zone. One player (in augmented reality) takes the role of a farmer that tries to move all the sheep on the map into a safe zone. The other player/s help the farmer by placing (tangible) bridges over rivers and fences to guide the sheep and keep them away from hungry foxes.
Development and Design
The development of Round Up took place from the middle of September 2022 until the beginning of November 2022. I worked on the project with Guðrún Margrét Ívansdóttir, Hallbjörg Embla Sigtryggsdóttir, María Ómarsdóttir and Sindri Pétursson. We really wanted to try making an asymmetric experience where one player was playing in augmented reality using a mobile phone, while another player is interacting with the gameplay using tangible objects. The idea sprung up because all of the group members are Icelandic and the Icelandic sheep round ups are a big part of Icelandic culture.
The project was developed using Unity. We used two different augmented reality platforms during development. AR foundation was used for the mobile augmented reality as that is integrated well into Unity and allowed us to deploy the project on both Android and iOS devices. Vuforia was used for the image recognition part as it provides good image recognition that is easy to work with. For networking we utilized Mirror.
We split up different tasks between us and I took on the role of lead programmer, which meant that I had some part in most aspects of the development. I worked on networking the different devices that were required for the game and made sure that everything was synched between the server and the clients. My other priorities were mobile augmented reality and image recognition. For the mobile augmented reality part, I made sure that everything was scaled to the correct sizes and that game objects moved to the correct positions after we moved the map to the correct position using the plane detection that Guðrún added. For the image recognition part, I worked a lot with María to setup the positioning of the in-game objects when a physical object was presented to a camera that was placed above the television showing the level.
I learned a lot during this whole project, especially how to work with augmented reality and image recognition. I also learned a lot about network communication between different devices and how to make everything stay in sync between clients and server.