Today I built the AR game and was playing with it on my phone.
Playing and re-playing my game made me reevaluate some aspects of the game. The most important part that I would change is the setup of the pause button – this is something that hadn’t occurred to me while creating the project – when I press ‘pause’ the timer stops, however, the player is still able to pop the balloons with the pin. This means that the pause button in the current version of the game is only a pause of the timer but not a pause of the game play in that sense.
Another quite important characteristic of the game that I believe needs further consideration – assuming that this is a real-life project that will be distributed in the AppStore – is the location of the pin in the game. Right now the balloons appear when the player first presses the Start button and the pin appears via the target image. This setup makes the game non UX friendly for the player since the user must hold the phone in one hand and hold the target image with the other to navigate the pin. In retrospect, I realize that this requires the player to have good left and right-hand coordination. If I were to re-do the game I would make it so that the pin follows the camera of the phone and the balloons appear via the target image. This way the player would need only one hand to play the game (the hand that holds the phone) and it would be easier to code a solution for the pause button since I would just code it so that when the pause button is pressed the active balloons that are yet to be popped get temporarily de-activated.