Rabbit Coder (Spark AR Tutorial)

Global round updates:

1. I have updated the tutorial to highlight the Spark AR features used to build the sampled software. I have added more explanations and reference links to the Spark AR documentation..

The commit with the updated tutorial can be found here: Latest tutorial commit

2. I have updated the sampled software to work with the latest version of Spark AR (version 102). These are some of the updates I made to the source code and tutorial:

Updated the code to use "async and await"
Updated the project to use findByPath and wildcards in order to access multiple objects.
Cleaned up the code to make it easier to understand.

The commit with the updated code can be found here: Latest code commit

3. I have also fixed a few grammar and spelling errors in the tutorial

Inspiration

This tutorial is based on a past hackathon submission that I made for the Facebook AR hackathon, it's a game called Rabbit Coder, you can find the project here. I felt the need to create this tutorial because I have not come across many scripting tutorials or tutorials that show you how to create 3D games with complex game logic in Spark AR, so I decided to make one for the advanced category. I chose the advanced category because the tutorial focuses on Spark AR's scripting module, so the reader requires some basic knowledge of how to use Spark AR and Javascript.

How I wrote the tutorial

To help me get started writing the tutorial I used the technical tutorial template provided by Facebook, it showed me how to properly structure the tutorial. The sample game used in the tutorial was built a few months back, so I had to update the project to work with the latest version of Spark AR. Next, I planned on what content I'm going to include in the tutorial since the word limit is 4000, I had to recreate the sample game with fewer features in order to make the tutorial shorter and easier to understand, as a result, I managed to get a word count of around 4000 words without counting the scripts code. This tutorial was written using AsciiDoc, it is a text document format for writing notes, documentation, articles, and books. For grammar and spell checking I used Grammarly.

Challenges I ran into

Since the sample game project has a lot of code and complex game logic the challenge was figuring out how to explain everything in an easy way and under 4000 words limit. To solve that problem I removed some features from the sample game to make the tutorial shorter and only left the main game mechanics.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that the sample game got first place in a past hackathon. I'm also proud that others will learn to build the game and use it as a template to build even better games.