Niantic // Directing a Live Game Feature
Niantic // Ingress // Overclock
Feature Director - Tech Art - Audio - VFX - UI - Prototype
Highlights
First VPS-AR game launched worldwide
A signficant set of Ingress daily active users engage with this AR feature even after 2+ years
Presented at Augmented World Expo (AWE)
Developed the project from concept phase all the way to shipping
Directed server engineers, client engineers, design, art, product, community, marketing
Communicated milestones and pursued production with all stakeholders in alignment
Fun things about the project Different colors make up the tesseract depending on which team owns the current Ingress portal
Different audio ambient sounds depending on which team
The 4D animation was fun to make, but it had to be very fast so it didn't impede player game-play. Since the tesseract had to be procedurally generated, then animation had to be procedural as well. The solution is to define a set of 4D coordinates, apply rotations in just two dimensions, and project the points down into 3D space so it can be rendered in AR.
Prototyping was done in Niantic's LA game studio which had housed a few other game projects in the same building. It was a good opportunity to grab random testers when trying to attempt an idea, and learn what made the game tick, and what things didn't work as well. I loved talking with folks, hearing their feedback on the feature and AR in general, and then coordinating with design on what the feature would actually look like once production started.
Challenges
Rendering the 4d hypercube involved complex matrix math. Everything here is procedural, so tests and bug fixing could only be done with the game running. Our team had to get creative about how to test artwork and VFX for mobile devices in AR as well.
Unique visual bugs that only occur on a specific subset of Android devices. Our team made the choice to ship with this bug, and it was finally resolved once upgrading to the URP rendering pipeline for Ingress.
It was invigorating to be working with brand new technology, VPS, and needed to anticipate problems with this experimental technology in a short timeline. By going through prototyping and then production, different types of choices need to be made in order to get the product shipped, deciding where we need to nail it on quality, or where we need to be more strategic with our resources. Lesson learned: Be very vigilant to keep away scope creep!
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