I chose to make an iPhone game as my honours project. The game, called Shadehunter, uses GPS and Augmented Reality to create an unique and immersive experience for the player.

Shadehunter revolves around defeating ghost-like creatures called Shades. The player uses their iPhone as a scanner to find and defeat the Shades and send them back to their own dimension. Shades exist at a specific location in the real world that the player finds using GPS and defeats using the camera on their iPhone. The players guide, Professor Quimby, will upgrade the player’s scanner as a reward for defeating certain numbers of Shades.

The player uses the EDR Scanner to search for Shades within a radius. If the scanner detects any Shades within a certain distance of the player they will show up on a map. The player must travel to that location and look around using the EDR Scanner’s viewfinder (the iPhone’s camera) to see the Shade.

Once a Shade has been revealed using the Scanner the player can attack it. The player must shoot the Shade with the radiation beam to lower its health. After each hit the Shade’s aggro will rise and it will move away making the player take aim again. If the player attacks too quickly and the Shade’s aggro gets too high the Shade will flee and the player will lose.. Also, if the player takes too long to defeat a Shade the aggro will begin increasing on a timer until the Shade flees.

Shades are composed of 8 component bitmaps and animated in code to allow them to appear animated without increasing their file size.

Professor Quimby, the game's only friendly NPC, will reward the player with upgrades to their scanner for reaching certain milestones of defeated Shades. The upgrades will either increase the radius the scanner detects Shades in, or increase the distance the player can be from the Shade before they can attack. The professor will also reward the player for defeating all the different types of Shades.

The world of Shadehunter is shared by all players. This means that there has to be a server system controlling all aspects of the game and keeping them synchronised.

The server holds the locations of all the Shades in the world and also the details of all the Shadehunters.

Rather than remove a Shade when it is defeated and then create another to keep the numbers up, the server will simply move a defeated Shade to a random point 10km away from where it was defeated. The player who defeated it will see it disappear and so will think its been send back to its own dimension and if they encounter the same Shade again they will just think it is another one of the same type.

There is a web front end to the server called Shadehunter Control. This provides a map interface showing the locations of all the Shades in the world and allows the administrator to easily add new Shades at any location or delete any that are no longer required. Shade details cannot be modified through Shadehunter Control. If the administrator needs to move a Shade he should just delete it and create another of the same type at the new location.

The also game features an online leaderboard to encourage competitiveness between players.

This trailer for Shadehunter was put together by fans of the game.