Zeal was a game that was developed in our graduate 3D Graphics Programming class in the Fall of 2009. The game itself is an augmented reality game that uses a suspended camera system to track fiduciary markers on a table to move units around on a map on the computer screen. Zeal is a 2 player game where each player moves the markers around on the table to move units across the battlefield. The object of the game is to capture control points on the map to increase their total score. The first player to reach 1000 points wins the game.
Development of Zeal was 10 weeks long on a team of 5 people, all with multiple skill sets. The game was built on a custom built game engine in C++/DirectX 10. To track the markers on the table, we implemented ARToolKit into our engine. This was fairly early and easily so it allowed us to test marker tracking very early into development. Another feature of Zeal is that we networked the game. This allowed us to have a “spectator” camera that could get in closer to the action while not disrupting the players on the main camera.
Enjoy this video that demos a group of students playing the game!