AR Game Design 101 | PGC Digital #1

welcome to our talk a our game design 101 so what's this talk about well here at Niantic we've spent the last several years working on AR and we've had the chance to have several billion unique AR sessions and we've learned a few lessons along the way so first up we're gonna cover some AR game design principles tips and tricks we've learned after that we're going to talk about prototyping in AR and finally we're going to touch on playing AR in the real world but first why are we so I'm Laura I'm a game designer here at Niantic I primarily work on Pokemon dough I've been the lead game designer on AR features like go snapshot buddy adventures and buddy adventures with multiplayer and I am so excited to introduce you to one of my favorite co-workers Kirsten thanks Laura hi everyone my name is Kirsten I'm a senior software engineer at Niantic I've been at Niantic a little bit over three years and I worked on Pokemon go for two and a half while on Pokemon go I was

detected four friends gifting trading and the go snapshot feature so before we get into the talk I want to tell you a little bit about Niantic Niantic started within Google in 2011 and since then we've launched a variety of applications that use augmented reality to make the real world a more interesting place our mission at Niantic is to encourage people to explore exercise and have real-world social interactions and we achieve this by creating fun real-world experiences around points of interests and other mapping information then we support that with meaningful in-game social and visual AR experiences now Laura's going to talk about how we approach visual AR thanks crimson so

what is they are well there's this dictionary definition that you can read on the slide but to be honest I think it's a little dry and it's not super interesting especially when it comes to game design and feeling inspired so what do we think Karen I ant it well we believe the AR is more than just the technology we think it has the ability to get people to move and that it can transform the mundane into something amazing so as a game designer where do you even start well here's a couple of tips first it's important to remember that AR can let you create experiences that are impossible to recreate in just digital space it allows you to interact with the real world in a new and interesting way as a game designer it allows you to make physical locations matter to the experience and as you can see in this video it also lets your player actually be a part of the experience that's not an avatar opening the door that's the actual player so it also lets you create new challenges and puzzles they get the player up and moving and at the end of the day it can

convert gameplay pixels lasting memories attached to the real world so how do you start tapping into that real world well it's really important to choose the right interaction layer so again today we have what we refer to as traditional screen space this would be where you would find things like the HUD you eyes the sort of buttons the player is most often interacting with however with AR you get this bonus layer we're gonna call world space so world space is always going to feel more engaging than traditional screen space the player can move around in world space and interact with objects as you can see in this video the players actually petting the Pokemon they're not pushing a button to it they're actually walking up to the Pokemon and rubbing its head to make it happy so it can really really bring your player into the experience in a unit quit you want to make sure that you're choosing which part of your game takes place in this new AR layer if it's a mechanic that requires a lot of UI navigation it might still be better suited to a non AR experience part of your game so visual details really

matter in AR to create genuine air experiences it's not enough to simply overlay your digital assets over a live camera feed you want to think about things like shadows lighting ground planes depth and scale as you can see in the picture here it looks like the pokemon is actually standing on the sidewalk it's really important to make sure that your ground plane in the physical plane match up with each other you also want to think about things like the effects so in the example on the right you can see how much more immersive the Pokemon feels with a real shadow underneath it and don't forget you need to make sure your objects scale so the player were to walk away from the Pokemon the Pokemon would get smaller the further away they are integrating the device into the experience so this is this is something a lot of us are you know trying to tackle right now we know they are he's gonna keep changing and evolving and we can't wait to see where the future it leads but right now for today you're probably going to be designing your AR experiences on a phone or tablet and it can be really easy for

that phone to feel like it's in the way of the players experience they can feel like it's blocking their view of this beautiful AR world you created for them we recommend making the device a part of the game design experience some examples of this include making a camera there taking pictures which maybe it's a periscope they're using to see someone specific or decoder they're using to help solve the clue so another thing that can be really easy to overlook when we're sitting at our desk all day is economics which you should remember oh and you're sitting to but it's very important when you're asking your player to walk around so I know what you're thinking I use my phone all day what's the big deal but remember when you're using your phone on a regular basis you're probably holding it close to your body and maybe arresting your arm on a desk or a couch when you're asking your players to use AR you're more than likely gonna be asking them to hold their phone out at arm's length so remember that augment reality on phones comes with a really serious or some physical fatigue to your players we recommend keeping your AR session short we find the sweet spot to be between 30

seconds in two minutes and then in between those sessions we recommend what we have what we call active resting periods so this is when you would switch back to traditional screen space and do some of those gameplay experiences that do require more heavy UI and button engagements so for those of us who have been working in AR for a while I feel like something everyone should already be on board with however AR is still pretty new for a lot of people and especially for players using your products make sure you walk them into the experience with something they're already familiar with for us we want one photo taking we figured it was something that almost everyone does every day with their phones already whether it's taking a picture of their pet family members or the occasional selfie are you players with an experience what they already familiar with on some level so that the newest element can be the AR piece that they're learning on that note make sure that the first few time is your players interacting with your AR experience that they have really clear and easy to understand instructions make

sure that the input analogues you pick can easily be explained in a single image with minimal texts to ensure usability AR can be a bit confusing for new players so make sure that they can always have access to the instructions with all of these tips in mind I'm gonna hand things over to Kirsten to talk about prototyping all right thanks Laura so prototype prototyping helps us in a few big ways it helps us find what's fun inform design decisions and foster collaboration so being able to experience the basic mechanics of different ideas with prototypes helps us evaluate if it would be a good feature or not since making prototypes also forces us to take into account real-world constraints it can expose challenges that we will have to overcome before shipping the feature lastly distributing our prototypes

across stakeholders has helped us collaborate effectively between our different offices and partners because each person is able to play the prototype on their own everyone is able to experience it and come up with their own opinions and feedback okay so this video is of a hackathon project that we worked on late in 2018 around that time our AR platform team had a new version of their API that we wanted to use and there were a lot of different AR ideas and the team wasn't sure which would be the most impactful to actually try to build as old-school pokemon fans Laura and I really wanted a way to take pictures of our pokemon in the real world so we created this prototype with some of our other teammates to share with the company many people ended up

having a lot of fun with it so we were able to put together a team to work on the NGO snapshot feature which was our single player a our photo taking experience it also kicked off plants for our multiplayer a our buddy feature that the team just launched this past December one thing we found while prototyping was that it totally broke your sense of immersion when you're trying to take a cute close-up photo of Pikachu then suddenly end up inside of Pikachu's head because of this we wanted to figure out how we can make sure to keep the integrity of the Pokemon and respect the personal space without restricting a player's movement and their ability to take great photos we experimented with making the Pokemon disappear having to flee with smoke clouds pushing them back

with the phone and so on and after playing with all of the prototypes we landed on a gradual blur when you get too close to the Pokemon we found this experience to be a similar feeling to when you're trying to take a photo of something and get too close and the natural reaction for people was to take a step back instead of continuing forward this is a good example of what Laura was talking about earlier about leaning into the constraints of the device this is this design was also light weight enough to not disrupt the photo taking experience since the pokemons position was not altered at all each prototype that we worked on was created with the goal of answering a question and shared amongst the team and partners they ultimately helped us work effectively across offices teams and

stakeholders and we were able to make quick informed decisions and ship go snapshot in less than four months prototypes also help solidify the value of immersion details since the team could easily tryout and feel the difference they made on how real and alive the pokemons sell the importance of things like shadows Pokemon reacting to the player their size compared to other objects and preventing clipping was really made obvious by the prototypes and allowed us to build consensus around them and prioritize those features during the development process okay before I hand it back to Laura I have a few quick tips that helped us during development the first is to create a mock environment that you can use to test the general flow and gameplay getting builds on device and then sinking and finding planes takes a lot of time so having a mock environment

let us focus on the gameplay first and iterate quickly we only had to create device fields when we felt ready to test something we were happy with the next is to remember that not all devices are capable of good AR experiences we want our games to be accessible and playable by everybody so we always make sure to think about how we can provide a similar feature and benefits to players with lower end devices in addition even high end devices have their limits so you want to make sure that your air experience feels good on as many devices as possible okay thanks for listening back to Laura thanks Kirsten we have a couple more tips you wanted to share about making an AR experience in the real world so one thing we like to remember is that air is not VR VR is amazing and can transport the player to entirely new

worlds however with the kind of AR we're discussing we're talking about augmenting the players real world so you know what else is out there in the real world other people and those people may not be using your AR experience yet if others are unsure of what's happening it can put pressure on everyone if your player is feeling socially stressed they might be less likely to use your app so a couple of to make a are comfortable for your player and those around them we recommend keeping your player moving as much as possible make them really active and make it clear that they're doing an activity in that same vein we recommend have no active gestures with their phone so it's really clear they're doing some sort of game on their device and if they do need to pause to take a picture for example we recommend having assets where they focus on the ground or the sky and they're less likely to be focused on faces another thing to remember out in the real world is that multitasking didn't be really hard it's hard enough to navigate the world as it is never mind with an additional er layer

well that AR layer can enhance their experience in the real world you want to make sure that it's in a way that's encouraged is safe and thoughtful behavior the world is not flat there are lots of gradients everywhere so you want to make sure the designing experiences that encourage the player to pay attention to their surroundings some ways to do this include giving the players time and space to comfortably play while staying aware of their surroundings make sure the player feels like they can momentarily pause and look up from their device and that it the game will still be waiting for them when they look back and finally we recommend avoiding encouraging risky behavior by not including things like time mechanics which could put pressure on the player to rush so in summary we talked about designing for the real worlds making sure that you're picking the right interaction layer for your experience the importance of visual details in AR integrating the device into your experience so it feels like a natural fit ergonomics and how important it is to take that into consideration with your design and don't forget AR

onboarding and making sure that your player understands the experience they're about to have and how to participate in it and don't forget err is not currently the social norm even if we're gonna get there soon and finally make sure you encourage situational awareness for your players and with all of that in mind make sure you're prototyping everything so that it says good and polish for your players as possible in summary there is an incredibly powerful tool for game designers that allows you to create a whole unique experience if you apply some of the tips we've covered you make time to prototype and keep in mind the unique challenges of gaming in the real world you can really change players view of their world if you'd like us to see putting all of these AR game design fundamentals into practice you can check out some of our features like go snapshot budding adventures and buddy adventures multiplayer in Pokemon go today we hope we've imparted a few of the lessons we've learned throughout our own efforts and we can't wait to see what the future holds for all of us thank you so much for watching your talk today we also want to give a shout out

to our amazing co-workers well put this presentation together today just like any part of game development it was truly a team effort if you'd like to learn more about Niantic please visit us at our website and keep creating amazing games in a our experiences and we'll meet you out there so yeah thank you so much for you know in passing all that upon us and you know it's things are really you know it's really fascinating to share you know pokemon go has been one of the major you know events I suppose up the last few years on mobile and and especially in AR it's been the believer in AR so yeah thank you for sharing that and if you've got some time with I believe we've got some questions coming up so that we can fit a couple e yeah so and first up is how do you see the potential of XR in near future especially on mobile yes when they are saying XR do they just mean like different devices coming together well I

mean it doesn't say so I suppose what I would take from this is is XR as a whole whether that be devices whether that be the gameplay experiences the whole sort of ecosystem and its continued growth within the industry and wider with the audience yeah I think a R and X aren t all the pieces related to it are gonna continue evolving and becoming more a part of people's lives I think in the next couple years you're gonna start some more and more experiences that are trying to tap into this unique AR layer and really bringing the world to life in a different way great yeah on next another anonymous attendee everyone likes remaining anonymous but that's that's totally cool that's fine in this digital space so someone wants to know just between us when will we see the first AR glasses but more seriously would you be excited to see AR glasses and do you think that would change our gaming fundamentally compared to where

we are right now yeah your glasses or something I think the industry as a whole is really excited about I think it's gonna let game designers create experiences in a totally unique way that's just different than anything we can even imagine right now with the phone device so yeah it's something we're very excited about you know I can't really speak to any timelines yet but I can't wait for us to get there and our next question is from Oscar Clark our moderator from the part one of our developer toolkit track and coming up next on our panel and Oscar asks why do you think it's been hard for other people to get significant success not in not expecting them to go as far as Pokemon go but a lot of other AR gps games seem to have struggled so I think one thing that's been really key for us is making sure we're finding experiences that really resonate day after day for players so we're not trying to create an experience that was really fun once or twice we're trying to find the sort of thing that like every day when you wake up you're excited spend a few minutes in that experience and I think that's been

a really key for us is it's finding a way to make something that like is replayable and exciting to do over and over again great and Matthew has asked do you think more major studios will begin to enter the VR landscape in the next few years but I suppose we should especially for you guys ropes that out to the VRA are landscape in the next few day at years days yeah I think it's something where the industry is gonna keep investing time and money into it I think both of you are and they're I think they just serve slightly different audiences right VR is maybe going to be a more traditional experience where you're at home perhaps connected to a console in some sort of way where for AR it really frees you up from being tethered to that console in your living room so I think games are gonna invest I can even see other technology companies looking and investing and using the technology to modify your de life yeah and I mean that's got us through all of these questions but I'm gonna give some people just do it you know a little bit more time to answer so ask some questions because I've got a

question of my own if that's all right yeah and I just wondered you know obviously one of the core elements to a are is immersion and so how hard if you guys found it especially when developing Pokemon you know such a such a treasured IP how hard has it been to find that balance between immersion and the sort of what we would consider traditional gameplay elements when you know when developing yeah I think um you know Kirsten section on prototyping was really key for us to find that balance you know there are things going into our first couple of AR attempts where we didn't know how long an AR session could be we didn't know you know how different a Pokemon would feel with a shadow underneath that eye and people make fun of me because I stress shadows all the time like what the day we added the shadows underneath the Pokemon it's like the entire experience changed right it went from feeling like this was just sort of an a digital experience and that I could happen to see the sidewalk to like oh my gosh the Pokemon it's there this is real we made real Pokemon so I think the best advice I can have for for

finding that balance is really take the time to prototype and keep trying different things until you strike that right balance so suppose there is in this case an awful lot of you know different work it's not necessarily more or less it's just very different work that goes into that prototyping because I'd say you've got to think of you know not just people and the environment but I suppose you know as as I saw with um you know with the different Pokemon you were displaying you've also got to think of different sizes of Pokemon some of them there are a lot bigger some of them are a lot smaller you know so yeah I mean I could talk about Pokemon from now until if infinity I'm such a big fan I've even got my little Pikachu with me so we've got another question DC an age limit for a our games for example the age range of poking our players in Pokemon go you know has there been a widespread or do we see and you know sort of more closed range in AR games so you know we were really fortunate with Pokemon that it has such a broad appeal it's it's really a kind

of game that appeals to people of all ages and there's a lot of us that grew up when you know we were it's playing it and still really love it as adults so it's it's definitely the sort of game that has a pretty wide reach I think they are right now is probably most exciting for adults and teenagers who are like more aware of the technology but I do think moving forward that there's gonna be some really great uses of AR to help improve everybody's life including kids and elders all the whole spectrum but yeah so right now I would say mostly young adults are getting really into it but I think that's gonna expand really soon yeah and Oscar's asked another question which i think is a really really interesting question and I know as a player that Pokemon go has been doing specific things around this question is do you think the Corbett 19 coronavirus situation it changes how we think about GPS experiences and you know and not to take some of your answer but I know that

you guys are Pokemon go did things with the laws and bringing the Pokemon to you since you can't go out but yeah do you think that's changing how we think and troubleshoot you know these you know GPS and I our experiences yeah I actually think it's something that really applies across the university to well this is like a really specific example it's been a really good reminder I think for everybody that you've got to stay really in touch with what's happening outside of your studio right you need to stay in touch with real-world events and where your players at and the experiences they're having and it's really important to have a team that can adapt quickly especially with a live service game and so we've been really fortunate we work with some really brilliant people who are working so hard right now to adapt to the current circumstances and to make sure that you know we have a really good runway for the remainder of this and then you know that we have a plan for when this is over and we're ready to get back to a little more normal sleep yeah I think it's something that the entire industry can take a look at and remember that you know it's it's not just about the plans you laid out on paper you've got to be able to react to the real world

exactly I mean you know I mean look at us all here in a digital economy like what you have been able to do for the conference has been incredible well thank you you know I think it's it's a team effort here in the industry is an industry effort isn't it to keep us all going so thank you being it I must say they they you know I hope if you've got another couple more minutes we've got quite we've got a few more questions that have come in you know unsurprisingly popular talk with a lot of questions so if you can spare is a couple more minutes it'd be great to do one or two more one or two more great so next up is Dan who says other than Pokemon go and there doesn't seem to have been any other AR games that have really you know approach that sort of global sphere and do you think there's any reason for that you know I think it's just a space that the industry is still trying to figure out it's it's relatively new and when Pokemon came out of it it was like this big new concept that I think people are still trying to wrap their heads around and figure out the right way to utilize so I think it's just a newer space that

people are still working on expanding into yeah and there's a few more things but I think some of them are maybe a lot easier this one this one next one is probably our last it's sort of you know an easy question but when developing area are games and experiences how important are having features or an infant's infrastructure that is social you know so low experiences are easier to develop but they are is the open world and the GPS a necessity so I think as we know just across the industry social tends to make games more engaging in more interesting for players so I think whenever possible social is really great I would definitely recommend if you're making your first foray into a are those starting with a single player experience and make sure that really works and really shines and then once you feel like you've really done that foundation expanded to social but not making sure that the individual experiences is really well polished is really key before you start bringing others into the experience um and I think you know I know we said one or two but I think this last one's just a really short and interesting one so we

will ask Hanna's final question is did you guys expect Pokemon go to be as successful as it ended up being at Niantic I mean I know you knew you had a big brand but did you expect it to be this popular you know I I don't know if this is the kind of thing anyone in the world can ever expect i I know there's a couple other key franchises new games like World of Warcraft for example like and you know you can have expectations and then when something hits as big as it did it you know is really overwhelming and amazing and it's been amazing to as the years have moved on to see how much people still love it and how excited they are to play in just means a lot to us how much our makers about the game oh well thank you and yeah no honestly it means a lot to all of our attendees here aver and everyone seems to really enjoy the talk and you know I'm glad we got the Q&A going as well with quite a lot of really good questions so you know Thank You Kirsten and Laura thank you both of you it was really excellent talk and you know I know this is a little bit different but yeah thank you so much for sharing all of your you know expertise and information especially for someone

like me a self-proclaimed Polka maniac I very much enjoyed that walk yeah thank you so much there's a lot fun I don't know thank you so much