Night Hunter: An AR Audio Exploration Game

Night Hunter, a game in which the player uses the movements of their head and the sounds coming through the speakers of the Bose Frames to navigate towards individual sounds in order to earn points. This game was the final project for MIT's Playful Augmented Reality Audio Design Exploration course taught in the fall of 2019, created by Sophie Clyde and Pablo Villalobos. In designing and building this game we wished to explore the design challenges and limits of audio-first game design, as well as explore people’s ability to recognize and locate a source of sound with limited to no use of their visual abilities.

Our original idea was a game in which the player uses “sonar” in order to move through an invisible obstacle course, sending out pings in order to hear where obstacles were in an invisible landscape. Slowly our idea evolved into a game in which the player moves towards they sounds they hear instead of trying to avoid them. We wanted to explore how gameplay would work in a game where audio was the main sense, investigating how good people were at locating sources of sound with little to no visual input.

After several rounds of playtesting to refine our original ideas, we created a robust prototype in Unity. Night Hunter, a game in which your ears are more important than your eyes, was the final result. When playing, you are a ship sailing through the darkness of space, looking for fuel before it runs out. The Bose Frames generate a sound when a fuel pod appears and you must turn your head towards the sound to navigate towards it; when it gets close enough, a white dot will appear onscreen so you can use both visuals and audio to course-correct and pick up the fuel pod. The visuals occasionally vanish as your radar cuts out, leaving you to use your ears alone to find the fuel. Can you survive when the lights go out?

You can watch our final presentation on the project here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/cms-s63-playful-augmented-reality-audio-design-exploration-fall-2019/resources/student-project-night-hunter/

You can read the final paper for the project here: https://18193375-aae5-45e2-bfae-30bfcdc62078.usrfiles.com/ugd/181933_376f3a00597547cab041904f2ecc145b.pdf

You can read more about the course here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/cms-s63-playful-augmented-reality-audio-design-exploration-fall-2019/pages/assignments/