Introducing Provocator

For the most part of the year 2014, Frak was prototyping and learning new techniques about what we could do on mobile platforms and also in the realm of virtual reality. But now the time has come to come out of the closet and introduce the world to our fighting game project that is steaming ahead at an enormous speed!

The game is called PROVOCATOR (work title). It is a 2D tournament fighting game for iOS and Android devices. The game is based on Universal Fighting Engine (UFE) but Provocator is more than just your average tournament fighter. It is a fighting game with a solid storyline and with some RPG elements!

The story of the game is about a young girl called Alia who is destined to be the bloodiest Gladiatrix in history. Set in the first century, the story begins in a small village of Vandal, Germania where Alia is trained to be a Gladiatrix. From there she will begin her journey through the ancient Roman empire, which leads Alia and her friends all the way to the sands of the Colosseum! It is up to the player to help Alia accomplish her adventure and the road is filled with peril and deception...

Provocator work in progress screencap

Provocator will have a single player story campaign, two players local tournament mode and also a network tournament mode, which enables player to fight against his friends online. Two players local tournament will include "AR arena", a special augmented reality arena that brings the fights to to the real world!

The basic gameplay consists mainly about the fights, bloody fights. First you select your weapon, then you enter the arena. You can hit, kick, slash and dash your opponent or throw daggers at him to mention the few fighting techniques. After you beat your opponent the Caesar Caligula's thumb appears on the screen. The thumb is either up or down to seal the opponent's destiny. You can choose to obey the Caesar or not to. See what happens, but be careful what you choose, it can effect the storyline...

Provocator work in progress screencap

Your character gains experience points on the weapon used in the battle. With the experience points you can improve your fighting skills to make more damage on your opponent and  unlock special moves!

Provocator work in progress screencap

Provocator marks the debut production from Frak, which is a Finnish game developing company from Tampere. Provocator has a team of five developers and a few trainees.

Provocator will hit the app store and play store later this year! Stand by for more info!

  

Provocator conceptual cut scene art

Experimenting Vuforia. Check out demo videos

At the very core of augmented reality based applications there is this thing called image recognition. Basically it means that when an image is viewed through the camera of a device, this image is recognized and it's orientation and distance can be determined within application.

When we know the distance and orientation of the image against our mobile device, we can use this information to create 3D space in our application that appears to be a part of the image that is viewed with camera.

Image recognition is hard. Building algorithms that calculate the position of tracking image in real time is a task that requires an expert of the matter -or rather an army of them. Luckily for us independent game developers, there are free SDKs that everyone can utilize in their projects such as Qualcomm Vuforia.

Using Vuforia with Unity is easy. Just download the Vuforia AR Extension from Vuforia site or directly from the Unity Asset Store. Import it into your Unity project. Create your image targets in Vuforia Developer website, download them, import them to yor project. Add AR Camera component to your scene and define Image Target objects. Remember to switch on "Activate dataset" at AR Camera GameObject and that's it!

In order to demonstrate this image recognition based augmented reality 3D space, we have prepared three videos for you. First there is the demo with Spark the Spider



And then there is Shaft the Shark demo. It jumps when being tapped!



Finally we experimented to recognize image from computer screen and it worked just as well as with the printed images. Say hello to Herman the Hellraiser!


We at the Frak are currently using this feature to construct a fighting action game for iOS and Android. In addition to AR, we have some other pretty cool features as well. Stand by for next time as we discuss QR code based optical tracking.

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What the FRAK

So what is Frak? Frak ltd is a game development company based at Tampere, Finland.

Frak was founded at the beginning of 2014 and we started working with Unity around march of the same year. At the start there was only two guys Ville Lähde (1979) as a concept developer and Seppo Säämäki (1977) on the code.

The idea was an AR (Augmented Reality) ghost hunting game for mobile devices, where a guy takes photos of ghosts running wild in the streets. The gameplay idea was a combination of geocaching and shoot em' up to describe it more accurately. Ville had seen this sort of a game in one of his hang over dreams roughly a year ago. Now it was time to make it real!

But little did Ville knew about the possibilities of current mobile devices and the game design. When Seppo came on board to write code and explore the possibilities what could be done with Unity, our possibilities expanded and our plans had to be re-imagined.

So here we are, six months later with a few scrapped demos, one helluva level editor and a new Augmented Reality game in the making! But we are only at the beginning... 

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