If you tuned into Snap Inc.’s fourth annual Snap Partner Summit: Back to Reality, then there’s a good chance that you saw Balti Virtual’s latest game release: Buddy Brawl. Over the last eight months, the Balti Virtual team has been working directly with Snap through their “Ghost” AR Innovation Lab.
After being selected for the Ghost program, Balti Virtual was asked to design and develop a game that “will build rich, complex, connected games that spread joy and bring people closer together.” Buddy Brawl is an augmented reality, multi-player, multi-level game that pushes the limits of what can be created within a Snap lens.
Our team was excited by the chance to integrate Snap’s latest and greatest features into Buddy Brawl, including Connected Lenses and support for 3D Bitmoji characters. The Connected Lens feature let us create a game that up to two players can join from anywhere in the world and the Bitmoji API integrates players' real Bitmojis into the game as fully playable characters.
Once players accept their invitation to Buddy Brawl, they are asked to choose from one of four levels. Each level presents players with a different battlefield featuring distinctive challenges and strategies. When a level is selected, players are asked to place the AR battlefield within their space to start the brawl. Players control their Bitmoji character around the battlefield with an on-screen joystick as they move to collect tokens and fire attacks.
Balti Virtual wanted to make Buddy Brawl more than just a 3D tabletop game set in augmented reality, and the team carefully considered how to best take advantage of the opportunities afforded by this new and evolving medium.
The resulting game strikes a distinctive balance between traditional platform brawlers (controlling an avatar to collect powerups and avoid obstacles) and the physical world (moving around the room IRL to dodge attacks). Players need to be on the lookout for plasma cannons, slime attacks, smoke bombs, homing missiles, and more if they hope to stand on the winner’s pedestal when the dust settles at the end of the game.
The Balti Virtual team was thrilled to collaborate with the team at Snap to develop Buddy Brawl and look forward to upgrading the game with the latest and greatest Snapchat updates!
