Steps to Design an AR Game

Simranjot Singh
4 min readDec 30, 2020

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In today’s turbo tech world, staying ahead in the design race can be quite challenging. While UI/UX is progressing, everyone now aims to simplify digital designing using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR/AR). Without a doubt, it’s the next big thing.

While working on big projects, each game designer can fall into many pitfalls while going through the process; being structured and able to extract meaningful conclusions can really help the last mile.

So, if you are designing or thinking of designing an AR Game soon, I am sure you’ll get all the required help from this article.

Step 1: Framing the Idea

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Before starting with the advanced development step, always focus on :

  • What is our game about?
  • What is unique about a game?
  • Why is it worth making?

Step 2: Gamestorming — The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.

First of all, think about :

  • Who will be your users (players, target audience)? I know you cannot get an exact idea who will end up playing it, but having a persona in mind will get you started
  • Possible locations
  • On a high level, what can be the “Mechanics” of your game/ digital product

Step 3: Stating a problem

https://blog.flexmr.net/evaluate-and-refine-your-market-research-strategy
  • Research
  • Model
  • Evaluation

Step 4: Understand the capabilities of the digital device you are designing for. e.g. A mobile phone.

  • What kind of information can it detect?
  • How can the user interact with it?
  • What kind of things can be detected in the world?

Step 5: Evaluating Ideas

Photo by Zainul Yasni on Unsplash
  • Identify the reasons why the idea should not be selected.
  • How much effort will it take to make?
  • How much creative opportunity is there?

Step 6: Ranking all the brainstormed ideas (on a scale of 1–4)

Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash

You can keep this process anonymous if there’s a probability of conflict in your big team.

  • Which ideas are worth solving?
  • Which ideas have the most potential?

Step 7: Write the Initial draft of your “Design Document.” Make sure to add the below pointers.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash
  • Overview of the game
  • Highlight the most essential elements
  • Reference images from movies, games or even from our daily lives
  • Create inspiration and storyboards

Step 8: Setting up the “Game Mechanics”

  • What can a player do in the game?
  • What can he/ she interact with?
  • What things in the game do?

Step 9: Designing Core Loop

  • Identify the three most repetitive actions and place them in a loop. For example, the famous game — Pacman focussed on the below actions.
https://www.videogameworkshop.com/game-design/Core-Game-Mechanics.html
  • What is the player doing over and over again?
  • Are the mechanics significantly different, or is it part of a group?

Step 10: Designing MVP (Minimum Viable Product) — Focus on core loop. Please don’t overdo it.

I really liked how the Extra Credits guys (youtube channel) have explained it in a very informative manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ

  • Focus only on the core experience
  • Design individual features

Step 11: Playtesting (observe your testers closely)

Photo by Habib Dadkhah on Unsplash
  • Define the aim of the prototype
  • Before the playtesting, think about — How will you collect the data from users, and how will you use it?

Questions to ask:

  • What don’t you understand about the game experience?
  • What was the most difficult part while playing the game?
  • What did you like or didn't like about the gameplay?

Happy Designing :))

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Simranjot Singh

An engineer by peer pressure, corporate professional by parent’s expectations & product designer by passion. I tell stories with a tinch of intellectualness.