Space Wars

The Context

March 2021. Meta Spark was still in its infancy. The tooling was rough, documentation was thin, and most creators were still experimenting with face filters and lightweight interactions. Full gameplay systems inside AR were rare.

Space Wars started without a brief, a client, or a production team. It was built entirely solo. Just curiosity, obsession, and the question: could Instagram AR effects actually feel like a game, not a gimmick? The answer turned out to be yes.

What began as an experiment evolved into one of the earliest fully playable AR arcade experiences on the platform without compromising on graphics. Even now, Space Wars stays in the portfolio because the mechanics held up, the visuals held up, and people genuinely kept playing it.

How It Worked

Players selected a spaceship and piloted it entirely through head movement inside a fully traversable 2D plane. Not just lane switching but full-screen movement. Asteroids accelerated toward the player while projectile systems tracked collisions in real time. Blink detection triggered laser fire. Miss too many incoming objects and the run ended instantly.

My Role

I developed the entire experience independently, including the gameplay systems, planar tracking mechanics, projectile logic, collision handling, asteroid instantiations, UI flow, and overall visual direction. Every interaction and gameplay loop was engineered directly inside Meta Spark Studio.

The Stakes

Building a 2D planar tracking system, custom projectile logic, and asteroid spawning inside a platform that barely had game development support in the early days of the software was the kind of challenge that either breaks your interest or deepens it. It deepened it.

Not many tutorials. Early documentation. Everything was figured out the hard way.

The hardest part was making the controls feel responsive enough with proper cleanup on instantiations that players stopped thinking about face tracking entirely and just focused on surviving.

Toolkit

Meta Spark Studio · JavaScript · Blender

The Recognition

Space Wars was selected for Lenslist Weekly, a curated showcase highlighting standout AR experiences from creators globally.

The effect later crossed over 20 million organic impressions, with an average open time of roughly 12 seconds — a strong retention number for mobile AR at the time, especially for a gameplay-driven experience.

More importantly, people replayed it.