Pac-Man Board Game AR: Proof of Concept in Unity

I was looking at this Pac-Man Board Game on my shelf. I figured if a board game version of a video game was fun, then wouldn’t a video game version, of a board game, of a video game be even better?

This Unity-based AR project was a speed build (~8 hours of coding and ~4 hours for 3D modeling/shaders/materials). I wanted to test using a physical object (the game board) as the marker and see how it performed under various lighting conditions. I threw in some pathfinding code I’ve been writing for an unrelated game project to bring it all to life.

Some tech bullet points:
• Designed in Unity 2020.1, using the ARFoundation framework
• “CRT Glow” by using HDR colors and Post-Processing visual effects
• Pathfinding performed by a custom node-based A* algorithm (C#)
• Tested on an iPhone 11 Pro, utilizing iOS’s ARKit marker tracking
• Wireless controls via iOS’s bluetooth Gamepad support
• Voxel 3D models created in Blender

(This is obviously just a fun tech test, and I won’t be releasing it in any way, shape or form. I double-checked and it turns out I don’t have the trademarks to Pac-Man. I think it’s going to end up as interactive art piece on my wall.)

Pac-Man The Board Game, by Buffalo Games
https://buffalogames.com/pac-man-the-...

Made with Unity
https://www.unity.com/