Building a Multiplayer ARKit Game with Placenote SDK

This new Unity package will teach you how to build a multiplayer AR game in exactly 20 minutes

We just released a new Unity package that will teach you how to build a multiplayer AR game in exactly 20 minutes. If you’re building (or want to build) a multiplayer AR game or app, this article is for you.

Multiplayer AR has been considered by many in the industry to be the key ingredient to making AR apps more social, and ultimately more “sticky” with users.

That sounds amazing, but how do you go about building a Multiplayer AR game? What are the design challenges with building an app like this? While there are several SDKs in the market building the tech needed to enable multiplayer AR, that’s far from all you need, as a developer, to build a multiplayer AR app. There’s still a ton of work you need to do to build the networking, UX, server back-end, and game mechanics before you can launch a reasonably good-looking multiplayer experience. So we decided to make this easier.

With the latest ARKit 2.0 release, Apple has included ARWorldMap capabilities similar to Placenote, but as a developer, using this means you need to manage the storage and sharing of maps yourself, as well as build all the player communication into your game from scratch (or use iCloud).

At Placenote, we want to make it insanely easy to build amazing AR apps. Placenote SDK provides a fully managed cloud solution for mapping and localization, but we wanted to go much further. We wanted to simplify building all the pieces of a multiplayer game, so you can focus on your game rather than wasting time building infrastructure.

Introducing Placenote-Multiplayer. — an extension to the existing PlacenoteSDK that offers everything you need to get your first multiplayer app up and running.

It’s a Unity Package that includes prefabs to quickly setup Player position tracking, Player Networking (Using Photon) and a simple Game UI elements that you can easily extend to build any Multiplayer AR experience you can dream of. We’ve also created a guided video tutorial to help you build a simple multiplayer experience in 20 minutes.

It’s time to get our hands dirty with code. To get started, check out the step-by-step tutorial we created to help you set up a simple, yet scalable multiplayer AR session in 20 minutes.

If you want to jump right in check out our Github repo, PlacenoteSDK-Multiplayer.

If you’re new to Placenote SDK, you’ll want to first learn a bit about Placenote and you can do that with our starter Sample app here:

Once you’ve gone though these videos and tried the sample code, it’s time to broaden your understanding of multiplayer AR development and start experimenting with new designs and game mechanics to build the ultimate mobile AR experience. Here’s a few bits of information that might serve as a useful starting point.

At a basic level, all multiplayer AR games have the following components:

Placenote-Multiplayer includes Prefabs to accomplish each of these tasks in a simple manner but you can now extend and customize these modules to suit your game.

We created a simple game called “Place Invaders” using the multiplayer SDK as an example to show you how to extend the Placenote-Multiplayer. This game is an alien defense survival game where you use your phone to defend against approaching aliens.

You can try it on the App Store here:

Or checkout the source code on our repo here:

See you on Slack!

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