Kyle Tugwell
© Kyle Tugwell - 2023


— PROJECT NAME

DracARys @ The Mill


— ROLE

Unity Developer


— COLLABORATORS

The Mill Experience Team (Development and Production)

The Monogrid Team (Development)

The Factory Team (Audio)


DracARys is an augmented reality application where users can raise a dragon from an egg to an adult with a variety of interactions such as feeding, petting and socialising. As the dragon grows it will develop its own unique appearance, behavior and abilities entirely dependent on your personal interactions with it, eventually reaching full adulthood, ready to explore the outside world.


DracARys works using Niantic's Lightship ARDK and features fully fledged AR interactions with the environment around, allowing the dragon to be behind objects and around others in real time.


DracARys currently has over 100K downloads on Android and iOS.


On DracARys, I mainly implemented audio utilising FMOD synched with working dragon behaviours. Additionally, I also helped with small edits on shaders, size/weight systems, user interfaces and a filter system.

Working with Audio supplied by Factory Studios, I created various Sound Managers to utilise FMOD's Banks, Reverb Zones and Events to add life to the dragon's animations through sound effects.


The reverb zones were utilised in order to play sound effects as if they are in a different environment, and are changed when the dragon is indoors, outdoors or in their cave environment. Accompanying this, the sound effects also change with the dragon's personality to give each dragon its own tics, responses and character.

The dragon egg utilised a shader created inside of the Amplify Shader Editor, and allowed procedural customisation of the egg’s textures, colours and cracks.

Inside of Amplify, I added the crack through utilising a crack texture, and lerping a CrackAmount through the crack’s mask and normals. This amount then shows a black crack through the mask and adds this on top of the egg’s current textures to create a crack that develops in steps over time.

DracARys included the show’s dragons appearing in-game around the same time as the episodes featuring them. With the dragons being generated, I scaled them correctly in comparison to generated player dragons which allowed dragons such as Vhagar to tower over the player and the environment.


This included refining the existing UI and creating a sense of mystery with the Westeros dragons by having their stats become ???. This was also utilised as a countermeasure for any player dragons with missing parameters and displayed their stats as ???.

An unreleased feature inside of DracARys was a filter system that was created utilising Minerva and Unity’s UI system. Minerva was a core system for creating interesting colour combinations the camera footage could go through which was activated utilising the UI buttons on screen.


This aimed to be similar to Instagram’s filters for users to upload interesting imagery to social media but was not included in the launch build.