Phase 2 (POP IT - colour based de-stressing)

POP IT is an advanced and AR version of the classic act of popping bubble wrap sheets. To scan and incorporate AR, we used Vuforia. As a first test, we created a small game where the player scans the world and spheres/balls appear randomly in the scanned space on screen. We could destroy them by targeting them and tapping a shoot button. However, we realized the mechanics of targeting and shooting made the player feel slightly active and aggressive rather than making him feel de-stressed and calm.

This was then tweaked further by removing the target and shoot mechanic. We simply added a swiping mechanic that allows the player to burst a bubble by simply swiping over it. Also, we incorporated a trail renderer to the ray cast so that the player knows where the blade is to cut the balls. To add these features in the game, we followed Brackey's tutorials for developing games similar to Fruit Ninja.

The visuals as well as the spheres deliberately have gentle hues of green, blue, pink etc. since they are believed to have more calming and healing effects on the mind and make one feel at peace.

Problems Faced

The first hurdle while developing this game was that the raycast did not interact with spheres, so the spheres could not be destroyed. Then, in several instances, the spheres did not spawn or there was no interaction with the spheres. The code seemed to be working fine on unity but not when played on the phone.

To address that issue we added a panel behind the bouncing spheres which allowed the spheres to be destroyed when the sphere was swiped upon while within the panel area (The players were limited to popping spheres only when they were in the panel area).