Ploppy
Small creatures that live at real places. You walk there, find them through the camera, and help with their puzzles. Built for the Lightship VPS Challenge.
The Curiosity
What if the whole world were the escape room?
Not a room dressed up as one, but the outdoors exactly as it already is: walls, stairs, stone blocks, the diagrams cast into the side of a building. If a puzzle could be knitted into the material a place is built from, then solving it would mean reading the real structure in front of you, rather than a screen laid over the top of it.
The Build
Ploppy Escape is an AR puzzle game anchored to real places near the San Francisco Exploratorium, built for the Lightship VPS Challenge. A map view shows where the Ploppies are; walk close enough and the camera view takes over, with the creature standing on the real fountain or the real steps. Each one has an objective, a hint system and a puzzle. Three characters made it in: a cloud, a sun with a solar panel, and a small planet with trees.
The thing that makes any of it possible is Niantic's ARDK, the Augmented Reality Developer Kit, and its Visual Positioning System. It localises against a scan of the place itself rather than a coordinate, and it is accurate to a few centimetres. That is the difference between solar panels leaning against the real wall and solar panels floating through it. Nothing in this game survives without it.
It shipped on the iOS App Store, and on an iPhone it ran flawlessly.
The Result
A working build, a challenge entry and a full set of store screenshots. One of the more ambitious pieces of the XR years.
What I Learned
GPS is the weak link. Some days a location simply refused to localise. Come back a few hours later, with the satellites somewhere else overhead, and the same spot resolved on the first try. Downtown is worse: tall buildings swallow the signal, so a good number of the sites I wanted, hemmed in by towers, could never be trusted.
When it works, it works beautifully. The visual anchors land where they should and the illusion holds. But the whole game rests on virtual objects spawning in exactly the right place, so a system that is right most of the time makes a puzzle that is broken some of the time.
Every place has to be walked, tested and walked again. The creatures were the easy part.
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