Night Forest was a proof of concept game demo for Stadia’s Stream Connect announcement at GDC 2019. Massive Black was responsible for concepting, modeling, and integrating a magical feeling world of cooperative multiplayer gameplay and puzzle solving, to highlight the high performance of Stadia’s multiplayer streaming capability. We also helped design the streaming command center, a place where observers could view multiple synchronous streams and interact in real time with the players in-game.

What does real-time cooperative AR gaming look like? Mobile AR gaming hadn’t been fully explored, and we worked together with a team of designers and engineers to figure that out. How large or small should the playfield be? What UI and visual cues would be the most intuitive and easy to use? How detailed should objects be, and how far could we push the limits of current mobile phone technology to deliver the best looking and performing games possible? TruckStars and Nightenfell were the results of that exploration.