AR portfolio: a tree-planting game

Maxwell Zuber and I built Ann Arbor Go for the AR half of our Michigan XR course. Players explore a map, switch to their phone’s camera to plant seeds on detected surfaces, and throw acorns to defend the trees from squirrels. Inventory and planted-tree information carry between the map and AR scenes.

I worked on the mode and navigation controls, camera setup, and acorn interactions. Maxwell proposed a drone mode that lets players scout the map before traveling. We shared the implementation, with both of us working across the game.

Problems deploying to the iPhone delayed our device tests. Once we could try it on the phone, movement that had felt fast in the Unity Editor felt slow. That difference made regular device testing a lesson I recorded in the course postmortem.

The video shows the original mobile game. The project page has a browser demo with a generated park and simplified planting controls. Its water and boost actions and growth stages differ from the mobile version. The original deployable build hasn’t been recovered.