Building AR Hide and Seek — Shipping a Solo Indie LiDAR Game to the App Store

The idea came from an extremely serious game of hide and seek with my cousins. We were adults, which made it ridiculous, but also strangely perfect. Someone was hiding behind a couch in plain sight, surviving only because the seeker did not look carefully enough. That made me wonder: what if looking carefully was not enough? What if the seeker could not freely look around the room? What if they could only see the world through their phone screen, while virtual obstacles blocked parts of their view? That became the core idea behind AR Hide and Seek: a local multiplayer hide and seek game where 2-5 players use the space they are already in. The hiders physically hide somewhere in the room, while the seeker views the environment through an iPhone. The phone fills the space with digital clutter, making familiar rooms harder to read. One phone. One seeker. Real hiding places. Virtual obstacles. Why LiDAR? LiDAR on iPhone Pro models gives the phone a real-time depth map of the environment, with centimeter-level understanding of the space around it. That means virtual objects can be placed in ways that respect real-world geometry: a crate can sit on the floor, a wall can align with an actual wall, and obstacles can feel like they belong in the room rather than floating on top of it. For a game where the virtual environment needs to feel like it genuinely fills the space, that difference matters immediately. Without reliable depth information, objects can drift, clip, or hover in ways that break the illusion. The tradeoff is device requirement. LiDAR is only available on iPhone Pro models, which narrows the audience. But for this game, the better AR experience was worth it. The seeker sees a version of the room cluttered with virtual obstacles. The hiders are still physically hiding behind real furniture; the phone does not make them disappear. It simply makes finding them harder. Designing the Core Loop The mechanic is simple on paper, but it took a surprising amount of tu