Updated 2026-08-25

The Room Is the Level Design

Here is what nobody tells you about building an AR game: you do not design the level. The player walks into one and hands it to you.

In a normal shooter, the arena is the design. Sightlines, cover, choke points, the pacing of an approach — all of it is authored, tested, and tuned until it plays well.

In AR you get none of that. Someone opens the game in a narrow hallway, a parked car, a garden at dusk, or a room with a low ceiling and a cat. The space is the level, and you have never seen it.

What breaks first

Difficulty tuning breaks immediately. A wave that is a fair fight in an open room is trivial in a field and claustrophobic in a hallway. There is no single spawn pattern that works in both, because the same pattern means completely different things depending on how much room the player has to turn around in.

Enemy placement breaks next. Put a drone at a fixed distance and it will sometimes appear inside a wall, which instantly destroys the illusion the whole game depends on. Put it too far away and in a small room it is behind the player before it is visible.

What we changed

Enemies come from above. That was the single decision that made the rest tractable.

Ceilings and open sky are the one part of a space that is reliably clear, in almost every environment a person is likely to play in. Approaching from overhead means the game rarely has to guess about geometry it cannot see, and the player rarely has to fight something embedded in their own furniture.

It also solved the pacing problem for free. Vertical distance is far more consistent across spaces than horizontal distance, so a wave that reads as fair in a lounge reads as fair in a car park.

The thing that surprised us

Players do not stand still. We expected people to plant their feet and turn on the spot, the way you would with a controller. They do not — they walk backwards, duck, and step around obstacles that exist in their actual room.

That is wonderful for immersion and slightly alarming for safety, and it is why the game works best in the kind of space you would happily walk around in with your eyes up.

No ads, no connection

The game runs entirely on the device. No advertising, no tracking, no forced connectivity.

Part of that is principle and part is practical: an AR session is already asking a lot of the phone’s camera, sensors and thermal budget. Adding an ad network to that is a performance decision as much as an ethical one, and it is not one that would have made the game better.