Waggle Words is a Featured AR Game in The App Store
Waggle Words is listed in two App Store Feature categories! # 2 in More AR To Explore & #4 in Game-Changing AR!
We’re so excited! Check out Waggle Words on the App Store and tell your friends!
Waggle Words – The World’s 1st Strategic, AR Word Game, Has Landed on The App Store!
Waggle Words
A Strategic Word Game
We’re buzzing with excitement to announce: Waggle Words, the World’s 1st strategic, AR word game, has landed on the App Store!
itunes Connect is looking into our random App Store bounces with Waggle Words. Please try again if iTunes acts up!
Waggle Words Game
Waggle Words is a strategic word search game set inside a beehive. Flying letters, chains of words, and a swarming hive keep the energy high! Players seek and select words with the goal of clearing the board. Create chains of words to greatly multiply your points. Power-ups let you move and manipulate letters to build new words, create longer chains, and clear the board. With three different game types, plus an augmented reality mode for supported devices, game play is always new and exciting.
Waggle Words iOS Features
Augmented Reality: AR mode for devices with A9 chips (or higher) running iOS 11(or higher).
Standard Play Mode: Available for all devices running iOS11(or higher).
Unlimited Levels: Over 85 unique hives with unlimited combinations of letters.
Casual Game: Play the hive at your own pace. A new game every time.
Speed Game: How many words can you make in 1.5 minutes?
Daily Game: Play the downloadable, unique game of the day.
Game Center: Leaderboards to compare your ability with other players.
iCloud Enabled: Share your personal stats across your devices.
Stereo Sound: An immersive experience with headphones.
Waggle Words Development
The original impetus for Waggle Words came from the youngest member of the Vermont Digital Arts family who at age 10 had the idea for a game that was a combination of the two indie games SpellTower (http://www.spelltower.com/) and Chip Chain (http://chip-chain.com/). Following this lead and inspired by two newly installed honeybee hives in the backyard, Vermont Digital Arts designed a strategic word game set inside a beehive. Much of the game's original artwork was created by the Vermont Digital Arts younger generation making it a true family endeavor.
Waggle Words on the App Store!
Waggle Words, The Augmented Reality Strategic Word Game, Lands on the Apple App Store Thursday, September 28, 2017!
Waggle Words
A Strategic Word Game
Vermont Digital Arts is excited to announce that our Augmented Reality enhanced strategic Word Game, Waggle Words, is landing on the Apple App Store this Thursday, September 28, 2017!
We’ve launched a new landing webpage dedicated to Waggle Words for iOS!
Waggle Words is loaded with fun and useful features!
Are you unsure about AR or don’t have a device that supports AR?
Waggle Words is just as fun to play in Standard Mode (meaning not in AR)!
Standard Mode is supported on all devices running iOS 11; AR mode is only supported on devices with an A9 chip or higher.
We’ll be adding an additional webpage for Waggle Words game rules and tips! Check back soon!
Waggle Words to be featured at the Unite Austin Showcase
All of us at Vermont Digital Arts are pleased to announce the iOS version of our game, Waggle Words, will be featured in the Unite Austin Showcase!
Unity’s Flagship developer conference, Unite Austin, will be held October 3rd – 5th in Austin, Texas this year!
Check out more of our video posts on YouTube: youtube.com/user/VermontDigitalArts/
Follow Vermont Digital Arts on Twitter: @VTDigitalArts
Follow Waggle Words on Twitter: @WaggleWords
Check out our Waggle Words Press Kit for more info!
Come by our Unity Showcase booth to meet the developers and play Waggle Words in both AR and standard modes!
Waggle Words – Dev Log – Scaled Camera Update For Added Perspective and Mobility in AR
One design problem we faced implementing ARKit into Waggle Words related to scale and perspective.
First, a little background information: Waggle Words is a 3D game originally designed for for iOS and then diverged into SteamVR development. We have hundreds of hive layouts (with infinite letter configurations), all of which are up to 3 stories tall and dozens of meters from the camera. In vanilla iOS, this works fine with our camera field of view and focal length settings. In VR, this works fine was well. In AR there were some problematic results!
The primary issue that resulted from a huge hive, which is very far from the camera in AR, is the following: Even though the hive looked the right size (same as in vanilla iOS mode), one could rotate away from the hive, but not walk closer or further away from the hive!
This is not an expected behavior for AR! Our play testers that were familiar with AR, all pointed this out immediately after demoing our beta builds! Others, who were not so familiar with AR, didn't seem to notice what was wrong, but felt something was off.
Our solution came to use via a tip from someone at Unity Labs! The Unity ARKit plugin is available on the Unity Asset Store; however, one may download the plugin directly from Unity's BitBucket Repo! More specifically, the Unity-ARKit-Plugin repo has a scaled-content-test branch which offered us our solution! (This branch has been merged into the main branch as of a day or so ago).
We now implement one AR camera to track the world and give us the video feed, and another camera which we scale to track the hive! This is a simplified explanation, but essentially the result is a convincing AR experience! One may now walk up, around, away from and through a hive!
We hope this is helpful to all those developing for ARKit in Unity! For more tips on ARKit with Unity, check out Unity's ARKit forum!