Apple AR: Adventure Awaits iPhone Gamers in ARKit-Based RPG

Another day brings another Apple ARKit demo, this time for a first-person role playing game that inserts villagers, vendors, and villains into real world locations.

Finnish developer Lauri Rustanius shared a series of videos via Twitter for a game called Genereal World that is under development.

"We are in the prototype phase. So they might look disconnected, but they will blend together in the final product," Rustanius told Next Reality.

In one video, the player approaches an animated boy, pinned to a sidewalk location. The boy asks the player to retrieve a key for his treasure chest. The player walks around the corner, finds the key, and grabs it by moving the cursor over it. A gang of ogres appears, and the player is given the choice to leave the key or keep it. The player opts to grab the key and run from the ogres, unlocking the treasure.

A subsequent video finds the same boy invoking the player to buy a pet. This demo takes place in a typical village a player would find in an RPG, with a (closed) tavern, windmill, and pet store, as well as additional non-playable characters. An older video, embedded below, shows a doorway that acts as a portal to a virtual room.

Game designer and writer Jesse Barksdale is contributing narrative design to the project.

"We both have a lot of ideas for cool AR projects – puzzle games, horror games, detective games, and a fantasy MMO. One of Lauri's videos (the portal/door video I posted above) got a lot of attention, which has gotten him a ton of meetings with investors. Hopefully he'll get funding and we'll have the resources to make something even bigger," wrote Barksdale on his blog.