Alice in Wonderland AR QuestSeptember 19, 2017, Apple released iOS 11, which supports augmented reality technology. Any developer could create an AR application using the ARKit framework.
On September 23, we in Avatarico released the game Alice in Wonderland AR quest.
In early October, the game
was the 10th in the world free AR-game by the number of downloads on the App Store.
A couple of months later, the game was marked on the
App Store Best of 2017 list.
In March 2018, the game
became the 4th AR-game in the world by downloads
Now the game has the highest rating among the AR-games leading in downloads.
Since the release, we have not spent a single ruble on paid traffic. We tell how it happened.
Prehistory
The decision to make an AR-game was swift, but not accidental.
Up to this point, we at Avatarico have been developing VR games (here are posts on Habré:
1 ,
2 ,
3 ) - since 2014 we have made 5 games and sold licenses for their commercial use. Now we have more than 70 partners around the world.
During this time, we learned how to use new technologies so that it was not formal (that is, we use the potential of technology, and do not play the game in a vacuum, where VR is just for show), learned to sell such products to a wide audience (spoiler: it’s not technology that sells and emotions) and make them so that they liked, relatively speaking, our grandmothers and mothers.
Therefore, when iOS 11 was announced on June 5, 2017, we realized that we needed to seize the moment and made the game in less than 4 months.
Idea
By this time, the experiments with the beta version of ARKit had already violated online. Every now and then we watched a twitter video with cool wow effects.
One of these was the effect of the portal.
Bumping into this video is easiest to tweetThat he seemed to us the most interesting. To repeat it was not difficult, and we took it into service.
As the setting, we chose Alice in Wonderland - the universe is popular and free, if you are based on the books of Lewis Carroll - they are in the public domain (as opposed to Disney products).
Development
Of course, one universe is not enough. Beat in the App Store “Alice in Wonderland” and you will find a myriad of unknown games for this tale. But we had a trump card - augmented reality, and we understood how to make wow experience with it.
If you look in the AR-games section, then you will see many games where augmented reality remains nominal. And somewhere even superfluous.
We wanted to make a game in which the user will gain experience that he can not get anywhere else.
Our rabbitThere was a hole in the floor in front of the player, from which a white rabbit jumped out. He had to be caught, and then from opened the portal to Wonderland.
You need to enter the portal physically, using your legs, holding the phone in your hands. Even now for many it’s so fantastic that we have to talk about it in plain text. Otherwise, the player may never visit Wonderland!
Inside the portal, you can move freely, meet the Cheshire cat and other characters, interact with objects and arrange an insane tea party.
Video walkthroughRelease, feature and download
Through the use of ARKit, we have a feature. Our application has been on the first screen in the "Games" section of the new App Store.
In the first weeks, we scored a few hundred thousand downloads and — more pleasantly — thousands of positive reviews; Players are delighted with the opportunity to visit Wonderland live.
Art for ficheringaAll this time we did not sit idly by, but developed new chapters of our history. In the first chapter, the player got acquainted with Wonderland, and later he returned to help her people from being oppressed by the Red Queen. Each chapter is a separate portal, a new location.
Due to the fact that we regularly released new content, updated and featured - the number of users continued to grow.
Unexpectedly for ourselves, the game went wild in Asia. Only a third of our users are Russians. Next come China, Japan and South Korea.
Accordingly, we translated the game into all the necessary languages.
Review Analysis
If you look at the AR-games section in the Russian App Store, then our game has an unprecedented number of reviews. Games that have been hanging for months in ficking next to us have a few dozen ratings.
In other words, something made users choose our game among all the rest.
In Russia, we are the most popular AR-game (rating 4.8 based on 5.4k ratings).
In China, we have the highest rating of 4.9 - higher than that of YuME, the local leader in the number of ratings (rating of 4.8 based on 14.3k of ratings).
In the US, we have a rating of 4.7, the same as that of the Zombie Gunship Revenant AR (this is the game with the highest number of ratings in the States - 12.4k).
Judging by the reviews, people like the entrance to the portal - the killer feature that we relied on (“Crazy tracking, nice graphics and the transition from the made-up world to the real one through the portal works on 5+”, “it feels like i ' m really in the wonderland ”).
Those who understand what AR is (I separate these users into a separate category, because the average visitor to the App Store is probably not even familiar with the abbreviation) also note that this is the best use of technology that they have seen (“AR must , "The Ideal of Augmented Reality," "Awesome! Best AR experience I've tried !!").
Results
- by the number of downloads, we are the fourth AR-game in the world,
- According to the number of ratings in the country where the game is downloaded the most, we are the third game in the world,
- rated in the country where the game is downloaded the most, we share first place with YuME (we have 4.8 in Russia, she has 4.8 in China).
findings
As we explain it to ourselves, such a result is a consequence of several factors.
What depended on us:
- wow experience (if the players didn’t like our game, it’s unlikely it would have received such success organically)
- the use of augmented reality for its intended purpose (just placing the game against the background of a working camera is not that; the essence of the wow effect from augmented reality is that you see how one world interacts with another),
- A good choice of setting (Wonderland is a fairy tale you want to get into).
External circumstances:
- AR is a trend, and Apple is actively pushing this topic,
- low competition - unfortunately, there are very few truly worthy projects in the App Store that would use the full potential of AR.
Thanks for attention. I will be glad to answer your questions in the comments.