Stealing back candy in an AR village, right in your browser

Objective

Quick to get, fun to share

You should be playing within seconds and understand right away what to do. And it had to be fun enough to play again, film and send to a friend.

Approach

One world, three mini-games

The game starts in your own room or street. You place a portal, walk through it and you're in a digital village. In the town square you meet three creeps, each with their own mini-game. All three work the same way: tap the falling candy to grab it back, and turn your phone to keep it in view.

Challenge

No stutter

An AR game that stutters or takes ages to load gets closed. The world had to load fast, tracking had to stay stable, and the camera had to help without taking over.

So we kept rendering and effects deliberately simple. It saves processing power and leaves less to break.

Execution

Keeping everything small

The game is one big world, not a series of separate scenes. So everything had to be as light as possible up front, instead of loading pieces later.

The 3D models are compressed with Draco or Meshopt, textures are resized and compressed, files are bundled and everything is served from a CDN. Players reach the portal quickly, and the world stays responsive once they're inside.

The portal

The portal is the step from your own surroundings into the digital world. You actually walk through it, phone in hand. At that moment the world has to stay exactly where it is, or it immediately feels fake.

I wrote up how the portal works technically in an article on Medium.

Read the article about the portal

When tracking gets lost

At the start, a short intro shows how to move and where to place the portal. If the AR loses its way anyway, a reset button puts the world back. Size and position are fixed once the world is placed, so it doesn't drift.

The camera shows the way

Tap a creep in the town square and the camera moves to the part of the village where its mini-game is. The move is smooth and limited, so you don't get queasy and the world doesn't start sliding.

Photos and video without a logo

You can take photos and videos in the game that go straight to your camera roll. There's no logo or branded frame on top. People share it their own way, and the creeps are recognisable enough.

Result

In the game within seconds

Meet the Creeps turns a Halloween pack into an AR game you're playing within seconds. Walking through the portal is the moment the whole game is built around. In the town square it's obvious what to do: pick a creep, play, go back, pick the next one. The game ran for three Halloween seasons, 2022 through 2024.