TruckStars

Mobile gaming is always at the peak of technological innovation. Continuously adapting and developing better graphics, enhancing to more realistic gameplay, and slowly closing the boundaries of our reality as we know it.

Augmented Reality (AR) is currently at the forefront of the recent changing paradigm in video games. AR is an interactive experience of a real-world environment whose elements are "augmented" by computer-generated perceptual information.

As this trend is becoming more popular and commonly used in technology, Massive Black was at the forefront of developing this technology to create an unparalleled gaming experience that had yet to be fully developed beyond the stage experimental or prototype. We tackled a project that had no real definition nor the status quo.

Essentially, Massive Black was hired to reinvent mobile gaming.

To produce a product that represented what mobile gaming will become.

We knew the technology. We knew how to build the platform. It still needed more. It needed a social aspect to take it to the next level. We needed to include friends. There needed to be a reason for the user to re-engage and to sustain growth within the game. A feature that had been neglected up to this point.

We began with the foundation and expanded from there. In order to add this whole other dimension, we need to build trust in from the beginning. We started with the conceptual focus to continually grow the platform off of. Our team put a tremendous amount of time into researching and developing the AR to be completely centered around friends.

Our team worked through the four principles of the trust spectrum, making sure to include each one specifically in the development of the game:

1. Play is fundamentally social - teams working together can accomplish things that individuals working alone cannot.
2. Humans have a pattern to their social relationships - Simply put, it falls into a pyramid: around 5 really intimate friends, 15 that are less so, around 50 that are more distant, and then an average total of around 150 social connections. This is also known as Dunbar’s number.
3. The variable here is trust. Human relationships progress through a set of stages which are pretty well understood. We start out tentative, trying to see what we have in common, then we gradually start relying on one another, and eventually come to trust one another. This is called "Social Penetration Theory."
4. Trust is domain-specific. Just because you implicitly trust your trapeze partner with your life doesn’t mean you trust them with, say, your finances. Social Penetration Theory uses the words "breadth" and "depth" to refer to the spread of domains in which you might have trust versus the degree of trust you might have.

As we understood this dynamic, we were tasked to build out the structure of the game itself. This included but didn’t limit to concepts, key art, marketing, modeling, texturing, animation, FX, trailers, user interface, and user experience.

Here is some gameplay footage of our work to view the elements of what we were able to create:

Our team created one of the most unprecedented works of technology in the gaming industry. This was done not only with our skill set but also using the entirety of our team's creative knowledge to push the pre-existing limitations or issues with the current technology.

The gameplay we built was so well done that we have received a number of recommendations and future projects from our work. Our team loved working together and have continued to actively work on projects together within the company.

We improved the status quo of AR and were able to develop a gaming experience unlike any other.