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p/conduct-thisA game of explosive railway action.
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Michael Flarup

Conduct AR! - An augmented reality railway action game 🚂💥

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Conduct AR! is is an epic augmented reality game of explosive railway action. Set in the old west you journey through diorama worlds that unfold right in front of you.

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Michael Flarup
Maker
Goooooodmorning PH! This one has been a crazy ride for us. On the eve of the iOS 11 launch we're releasing our second game as Northplay. Conduct AR! started as an experiment with ARKit, seeing if we could port our original mobile game Conduct THIS! We couldn't. Turns out, making something that already has a regular 3D component into AR doesn't work in most cases. The game quickly became much too hard and, more importantly, it didn't bring out all the best stuff that augmented reality has to offer. So we threw out everything and started from scratch. Today Conduct AR! Has become it's very own standalone experience and now joins the 'Conduct'- Franchise. It's set in the old west and takes full advantage of the possibilities of AR: making you move around, look over landscapes and solve spatial puzzles. Building an AR-only experience turned out to be a lot of fun, and very challenging. With the natural deadline of the iOS 11 launch looming, we've been crunching to get this ready for today – working closely with Apple and taking suggestions under development to improve controls and UI to make it the best possible showcase for the technology. Let me know if you have any questions, I'll check back regularly while we launch this! ❤️
Horea Burca
@flarup Great stuff, this is looking really cool. I'll definitely give it a try once I get updated to iOS 11. Good job guys!
Martin LeBlanc

I loved the first version of Conduct this! and this is even more fun. The use of AR is great. You'll have to move around to look behind a mountain top to follow the train. This gives the game a great sense of realism and adds a fun dimension to the game.

Pros:

AR is well integrated into the gameplay - it's not just a gimmick

Cons:

You have to move around quite a bit (don't know if that's a con)

Alex Marshall
I've enjoyed following the development of this, so it's cool to finally see it launch! 🚂💨 I'm interested to know how you've had to change the gameplay experience in this version, vs Conduct THIS! to balance difficulty? I found Conduct THIS! pretty tough as it was so copy that across to the AR version but then adding the fact that trains are now hiding behind mountains, would make the game seriously hard! Curious to know what elements/features have had to be removed or replaced in this version
Michael Flarup
Maker
@marsh931 Thanks Alex! It's been a wild ride. I actually just wrote more in-depth about some of the changes and why we made them here https://medium.com/@flarup/launc... Here's an excerpt i think is very fitting: "As things were progressing we learned that what makes AR special from a game-design perspective is the players ability to be in control of the camera in the game world. Usually AR experiences focus on the wow-effect of the game taking place in your real world setting. However, at the current state of the technology, this is more of a fun side thing than an actual design foundation. AR lets us project games on surfaces around us and with ARKit it has become a good deal more reliable and easy, but it’s still *just* a 3D scene for the game to take place in. We’re not sensing objects or multiple planes. You can’t interact with things on your table or fall off the edge. Maybe in the future, but not yet. And certainly not something you can reliably design for. No, what’s really interesting is not that the game is taking place on your dinner table (even though that never gets old). It’s that you, the player, is in full control of the viewfinder into the game world. Designing for an AR-only experience meant taking advantage of this freedom. This makes AR perfectly suited for spatial puzzles were you need to explore a world, look over and around obstacles and keep track of multiple moving objects. We adjusted the core mechanics of Conduct THIS! to fit with this new world-emphasis. None of the levels from Conduct THIS! was portable, and we ended up designing everything from the ground up."
Alex Marshall
@flarup Nice, I’ll have a read of the full write up 👍