Visual Scripting for AR Board Games in Thrymd

Sammanfattning: In recent years, the interest in Augmented Reality (AR) applications for entertainment and productivity has grown. One company exploring this technology is LAZER WOLF STUDIOS, the developers behind Thrymd: an AR-driven board games platform powered by the Unity engine.  This paper details the development of a visual scripting framework, meant to provide end users with a means of developing their own games for the platform, without significant programming or background knowledge required. A graph-based visual language was implemented in a custom Unity editor window, in order to maintain a familiar and consistent feel for users. The graph consists of a series of branching, interconnected nodes which pass data in-between each other, and execute in succession. The graph is serialized as a Unity asset, and can easily be interacted with through regular C# scripts.  A small number of nodes were implemented, but for the system to be viable, more are needed. For that reason, extensibility was a core ideal; creating new node types must be fast and painless. As with any script layer, performance is generally worse than compiled code. Further work is needed to improve user experience.