Apple AR: Color BlastAR Rides the Rainbow from Tango to ARKit

Mobile game companies Hit Point Studios and Legacy Games have adapted their Color BlastAR augmented reality game for iOS with the ARKit platform.

The free game, aimed at children 6-12 years old, places colorless cartoon characters throughout the physical play space. Players, armed with various digital paint-delivery devices, are tasked with coloring the creatures, with arcade and story modes available.

Apple AR: Color BlastAR Rides the Rainbow from Tango to ARKit — *Image via Hit Point Studios*

The game originated on the Tango platform as Crayola Color Blaster, with the game taking advantage of the sensors set to stage the AR gameplay. Legacy handled licensing with Crayola, design & publishing, with Hit Point acting as the developer.

Despite a nomination for Best AR Experience in the Google Play Awards and a semi-finalist at the Google Indie Games Festival, the original version of the app attained less than 5,000 downloads due to the limited selection of Tango devices.

Now, with Hit Point acting as publisher, the game has dropped the Crayola name and enhanced the arcade mode to take advantage of larger spaces, particularly outdoors.

"Bringing the core gameplay of Color BlastAR from Tango to ARKit was fairly painless. HitPoint developed the Color BlastAR game in Unity and used the corresponding Tango and ARKit SDKs which have both been very well supported. Fortunately, all of the game logic for Color BlastAR was separate enough from the AR logic lived within the SDKs," said Paul Hake, CEO of Hit Point Studios, in a statement to Next Reality.

Hake noted that the current release of the game does not leverage all of the capabilities of ARKit. The next version will take advantage of ARKit's ambient light estimation to add shadows and dynamic lighting.