Oni Egg Hunt is an augmented reality (AR) game where players race to take selfies at landmarks around Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture, Japan.
To play the game, the player brings their GNSS-equipped phone along as they explore Ibaraki. “Eggs” are distributed across the city; eggs that are difficult to reach from the starting point (Ritsumeikan University) are worth more points. Acquiring eggs requires players to be within 10 meters of a landmark, and points are gained after a player takes a picture while at the landmark.
The game is intended to play alongside other people or teams; the first to reach 66 points wins.
At Ritsumeikan University, in addition to working on our senior capstone project (see Shin’ai), we were also tasked with making a game using GNSS signals. Leading my team, I thought that it would be interesting to make a game about completing AR challenges at landmarks across Ibaraki, in a way to encourage future study abroad students to explore the town.
One of my roles was to be the team’s artist. I created several icons for Oni Egg Hunt, including with a creation of a mascot: the Oni-Bunny, which draws from the Ibaraki Douji, an oni that serves as Ibaraki City’s actual mascot.
For the rest of the icons, I used the same pink-blue-yellow color scheme to keep up the game’s “cute” feel, in line with Japan’s mascot culture.
Mentioned above, I was also heavily involved with the design of Oni Egg Hunt. The original plan was to have the app function as a way to drop messages across Ibaraki, similar to the messages in Dark Souls. Our second idea was to have a series of challenges spread out around Ibaraki, with teams racing to complete them the fastest.
Due to a lack of development time, we settled on having gaining points based around only taking selfies, as it also allowed playtesters to focus purely on physical speed and route-making.
The process of finding locations around Ibaraki was the most fun part of development: so many unique landmarks were found by going off the beaten path and taking time out of our days to go exploring–exactly what we wanted teach our game’s players to do.
As a bonus, here’s a cringe-worthy video of me and Jake Matthews trying out the game!
Software corner
– made in Unity Engine
– icons drawn in Krita
Credits
– Ichigo-san and Oishi-san, coding work
– Jake Matthews, design work, coding work, exploring Ibaraki, being part of the demo video with me, etc.