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Magic AR has launched Season 1 for its multiplayer mobile fighting game that uses augmented reality (AR) to merge the virtual and physical worlds.
Dubbed Jaduthe game is now available to download for free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, as well as on Google Play for Android devices.
Building on the game's initial release in October 2023, Season 1 introduces players to an expanded world full of cinematic quests and hero characters with new fighting styles.
Since launch, Jadu has seen strong early engagement with more than 790,000 matches played by 250,000 players, earning 4.9 stars on the AppStore, said Asad J. Malik, CEO Jadu AR, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The game will move beyond the initial proof-of-concept phase, where players could experience AR combat on their phones, to a dynamic adventure with multi-levels, hero characters, a robust item shop and skill progression, Malik said.
In Season 1, players navigate a supermax prison that is brought to life in their room, one AR battle at a time. As the player's avatar battles Imperial robot guards with increasingly dangerous attacks, the physical room of prison cells transforms into walls, infinite elevators, and basic research facilities.
Jadu's approach to AR allows players to control their avatars from a third-person perspective, making gameplay much more comfortable compared to AR's usual first-person perspective.
Jadu takes modern smartphones equipped with LiDAR sensors, high-resolution cameras and fast networks and shows players the true potential of their phone. Jadu takes full advantage of these features to create dynamic gaming environments that overlay the player's space for an immersive gaming experience.
“After years of iteration, we have spatial gameplay that feels natural and immersive without sacrificing scale or accessibility,” said Malik. “But as the character concepts circulated around our remote team, we knew we were building a world worthy of the medium. Season 1 is our joy of discovery wrapped in a game.”
New heroes: TukTuk and Absynth
When you start the game, you enter the single-player campaign, a way to introduce the player to the game mechanics. There are five isolmetric levels to play in campaign mode. You fight several robots and escape from a facility. The AR then shifts to your own room and turns it into a 3D space. Things appear in your room. You have to fight, hit and block enemies in your room with a shield.
This season introduces two new playable characters that can be unlocked by completing various missions in the game. Hardened by decades of driving his truck on the unforgiving highways of South Asia, ChaCha TukTuk (inspired by a real-life truck driver that Malik admired) will stop at nothing to avenge his unfair captivity with the brutal art of fire and oil. Encased in a bionic metal armor, Absynth is a femme-fatale who wields poisonous concoctions that are as alluring as they are deadly.
In addition to hero characters, players can build their own fighter and style in a massively expanded store with millions of new cosmetic combinations – from spiked combat boots to football pads to a sushi chef outfit complete with a cuddly cat.
There are 126 new items in Season 1 and 10 different levels and five different skills that you can upgrade over time. The game has no location element. Malik believes it makes sense to target a younger audience with details like songs, characters and ads.
Spinning
Jadu AR was founded in 2019 with a fascination with what virtual characters interacting with physical spaces can do for culture. Over the years, the team has collaborated with Elton John, Grimes, Lewis Hamilton, Lil Nas
Jadu AR has raised $42 million from investors including Bain, General Catalyst, LG Tech Ventures and Com2Us. Jadu's international team of designers, engineers and creatives are on a mission to create AR games that redefine the relationship between gamers and their real world.
About a year ago, the company started working on an AR fighting game, then released the title in October. For an AR game, it got a pretty good audience. The team gathered the feedback and refined the title over the last six months as the team figured out if the core mechanic actually worked well. Now it is launching the update called Season 1.
The point of bringing the original title to market early was to test the behavior of how people played as they pointed their phones at the real world and saw images from the game appear on the screen in a way that reflected reality and the AR images mixed together.
“We wanted to make sure people really wanted to play something like this before we went ahead and made a ton of content for it. Now we've had about 250,000 installations. And the App Store rating is 4.9 stars, which gives us an indication that people want to hold up their phones and play a slightly more immersive game on mobile. So with confidence we have now built a lot of content.”
AR move forward
Malik said people had not realized how the quality of mobile AR had improved. Image tracking is better and capturing facial details works, as does geolocation, he said.
“People realize that it is actually much more natural than you would think. You can actually move very confidently. And things don't go out of sight and things don't flicker or float around,” he said. “It's actually quite consistent. That's catching people off guard in a good way.”
Special effects now also have better production values. The game has been in the works for three years. During that time, the company has had to learn more about mobile game design and monetization. Fortunately, the studio is well funded and has a team of 45 people.
“We are one of the few studios that have the resources to do this,” he said.
Looking ahead, he said: “I'm not a purist at all right now in terms of headset versus mobile. I'm not a purist when it comes to whether or not to pass on. But I do need a bigger reality,” he said. “The images are very important to us.”
While Pokemon Go took off as a geolocation game with AR effects, it's been harder for other AR games to gain traction, even Niantic, the maker of Pokemon Go. There is growing interest in AR thanks to the debut of the Apple Vision Pro, which features mixed reality technology. But it will take a while before that product breaks through to the mass market.
“I am personally very enthusiastic, but at the same time the market is not there yet. We are incredibly optimistic about smartphones,” he said.
Meanwhile, Malik thinks smartphones are capable of much more than what they currently do.
“Mobile gaming is really the space we're entering. Instead of thinking of ourselves as an AR game and trying to compete with other people, we are now looking at mobile gaming and the world of games like Monopoly Go and Clash of Clans,” he said. “We try to make interesting things for that audience.”