2018 Irish Enterprise Award

36 EU BUSINESS NEWS / 2018 Irish Enterprise Awards , Best Augmented Reality Games Development Company 2018 Haunted Planet Studios is an innovative game development company dedicated to creating mystery adventure games for Android and iOS. We invited Founder DrMads Haahr to talk us through the firmand the secrets behind it success. either with literary heritage, socio-cultural practices or history. The clients for this product are in the cultural heritage sector. “Currently, our latest project is not actually augmented reality but a visual novel game that aims to educate trainee peacekeepers to improve their cultural and gender awareness, as well as their communication skills. This work is an EU- funded collaboration with Trinity College Dublin and other project partners, including a number of organisations that educate peacekeepers, such as defence and police forces from across the EU. The end- users will be organisations that supply peacekeepers to conflict zones and want to make sure they are well educated.” With gaming becoming a vital part of everyone’s lives, Mads and his team are keen to create innovative stories that will be more than just a way to pass time. Mads discusses how this is built into the studio’s mission and the ways in which it works to achieve excellence for everyone who plays its games. “Studies show that in Europe 50% of smartphone owners play games on them. This is the lowest percentage of any region in the world (in Asia it is over 70%), and going forward we are expecting Europe to catch up. In addition, smartphone ownership is still growing worldwide. These trends mean that games are becoming a part of nearly everyone’s life. “Therefore, our mission at Haunted Planet Studios is to do develop games that tell new types of stories, or tell them in new ways, and we do this to the highest possible standard. For the location-based augmented reality games, our ideas about storytelling were essentially reinventions of gothic storytelling techniques. For the Gaming for Peace project, the visual novel format is well-known but the story material is based on over a hundred interviews with experienced peacekeepers and is therefore original in its degree of realism and the verisimilitude in the characters, encounters and situations that appear. “To ensure that our games meet the needs of our players, we aim to be uncompromising about our game design. We aim to introduce people to new technology and concepts and use them creatively. To this end, we work hard to ensure all our work is in line with best practice and incorporates GBA17005 Established in 2010 as a means to bring to market the results of a collaborative project between the National Digital Research Centre and Trinity College Dublin, today Haunted Planet Studios is working on a platform for the creation and distribution of location-based augmented- reality games for smartphones. The firm’s creative technology combines highly realistic visuals, engaging gameplay and a unique location-based approach to audio with a sophisticated story-driving technology, as Mads explains. “At Haunted Planet Studios, the majority of our augmented reality games are location- based adventure games that cast users as paranormal detectives, whose job it is to gather evidence and solve a mystery. In addition to supporting our own games like the award-winning Bram Stoker’s Vampires, we are making our game engine and platform available to other content creators for making games such as mythical and fictional games like Carolan’s Last Tune and The Lion Queen, or historical walking tours such as Walk 1916. Nearly all our augmented reality games are all cultural heritage games engaging