Augmented Reality made a massive revival in 2011 with the impressive efforts of the team at String Labs and their solution for mobile AR. Quickly becoming life-long friends with the team behind this rebirth brought forth an amazing challenge with massive rewards. Before the public launch of their plugin, String tasked myself and my team at Bully Entertainment with providing “something cool” to be included in a demo application that would live on the AppStore.
After a long weekend of sketching ideas, developing prototypes and driving my wife crazy, Pharaoh’s Fury was born and the team hit the ground running. Featuring an intelligent, steering behavior-based targeting system and a simple game mechanic, the final result became one of the first executions in augmented reality that dove past the gimmick to provide players something that made the technology invisible while offering a brand new way to play.
The game’s marker was featured in the first issue of “The Daily” (the Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch iPad-only newspaper) which allowed readers to play the game as it spawned from the screen of their iPad. Though simple, the impact of this release was massive and numerous YouTube videos quickly appeared covering the project and it’s wow-factor.
