Portals tear open in your living room. Hold it.
Portal Frontier scans your room and turns it into a battlefield. Portals open on your real walls, enemies come out of them and hide behind your real furniture, and between waves you build turrets on your real floor.
In development · not released
We never see your home
The scan stays on the phone. What reaches our server is a floor plan of boxes — walls, furniture and an outline of the floor, about the size of a text message.
No camera frames. No LiDAR mesh. No spatial map of your house. The game needs to know that there is a sofa two metres from a wall so that something can hide behind it; it does not need, and never receives, a picture of your sofa.
This is an architectural decision rather than a policy, which means it is enforced by tests rather than promised in a document. The whole of it, in plain words →
A wave defense game where the map is somewhere you live
Every other AR shooter puts something imaginary in your living room. This one makes your living room the level. The portal is on the wall you painted. The thing crawling out of it is behind the sofa you bought, and it is hidden by that sofa until it isn't.
Scan once
Walk the room with the phone. Two minutes, and you never have to do it again for that room.
Hold five waves
Portals open on the walls, the ceiling and under the furniture. Between waves you build.
Two to four players
In the same house, in the same room, sharing one match. Revive each other or lose together.
The room is the level design
- You scan the room Walls, furniture, the shape of the floor. The phone does the looking and keeps what it saw.
- The server derives an arena Where a portal can fairly open. Where a turret is worth building. Which way something can walk, and what it has to walk around.
- Everything is fought against real geometry Enemies path around the actual furniture and are hidden by it. The server checks your shots against the same room your phone drew.
- The boundary keeps you off the television The play area is the walkable floor with a margin. Approach the edge and it glows, buzzes, and then stops you.
A phone with LiDAR, and a room
- iPhone 12 Pro or newer. A floor, not a recommendation: the room scan needs the LiDAR sensor, and no phone without one can play.
- A room you can turn around in. The game refuses a space it cannot make a fair arena out of, and says specifically why rather than playing badly.
- Nothing to print, wear or set up. No markers, no beacons, no furniture to move.
- For co-op, everyone in the same room. Playing together across two houses is a different game and it is not this one yet.
The obvious ones
Can I play it?
Not yet. There is no release and no date. There is a browser version you can try today at /play, which is a real client against the real server rather than a video.
What exactly do you receive when I scan my room?
Boxes and an outline. A list of walls and objects with a size and a position each, the polygon of the floor, and how high the floor was. That is the entire upload and it is roughly ten kilobytes. See privacy.
Is it safe to move around while playing?
The play boundary is a system rather than a warning screen. It is derived from the actual walkable floor of your actual room, inset by a margin, and it warns and then stops you before the furniture does. It is the same geometry the enemies path against, which is why it is honest about where things really are.
Do I need friends to play?
No. There is a solo game. Co-op is two to four people standing in the same room.