Bisons Go

Bisons Go turns your neighbourhood into a fantasy battleground. Open the AR camera to find monsters, treasure chests and coins pinned to real GPS locations, challenge nearby players by scanning their QR code, and team up for co-op raids against four ancient gods of the Boring Kingdom. It is free-to-play with no pay-to-win — "Step outside. Battle for real."

The full product is built and run by Lervad end to end: the native game app, the Firebase backend, and the marketing site at bisons.dk — which itself runs on Tempest CMS.

Tech stack

• App: Vue 3 + Ionic 8, TypeScript and Vite, with Pinia state, vue-router and vue-i18n (English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German).
• Native shell: Capacitor 7 packaging one codebase into native iOS (14+) and Android (SDK 33+) apps, shipped to the App Store and Google Play as dk.bisons.app.
• Custom native plugins (Swift / Kotlin): bisons-ar for the AR camera (ARKit + SceneKit) with GPS element spawning and live QR detection, bisons-rtdb for real-time location/presence/PvP sync, and bisons-sound for native audio.
• Backend: Firebase — Firestore for game data, Realtime Database for live location and battles, Authentication, App Check (ReCaptcha Enterprise) and Remote Config feature flags. Leaflet powers the world map.
• Delivery: GitHub Actions CI/CD to Firebase Hosting with PR preview channels, and an automated version-sync across the iOS and Android builds.

Features

• AR exploration: monsters, treasure and coins rendered in the camera at real-world coordinates, with distance-based visibility.
• Tactical turn-based combat: 12 classes across tank / DPS / caster roles, a Strength–Agility–Intelligence advantage triangle, four abilities each, damage-over-time and status effects.
• Real PvP: instant duels by scanning another player's QR code, with persistent match history.
• PvE & raids: dynamically generated NPCs (6 rarities, 18 classes, special traits) and co-op party raids against gods scaling to level 1,000.
• Permadeath: defeat is permanent — revive with Phoenix Feathers or at graveyard shrines.
• World-building: claim real locations and build Bison Farms — vendors, banks, gold mines, graveyards and boss spawners.
• Progression: a 10-branch talent tree, 80+ quests across five chapters, 32 achievements and global leaderboards.

Development

Bisons Go is a hybrid build: an Ionic Vue app wrapped in Capacitor, dropping to bespoke native Swift/Kotlin plugins exactly where the web platform can't reach — AR rendering, real-time sync and audio. The serverless Firebase backend handles real-time multiplayer at scale, with security rules that isolate public profiles from private inventory and gold. The result is ~170 TypeScript/Vue files, a dozen Pinia stores and a combat engine of its own, all shipped live on both app stores (v3.0.4).

Tech read: Ionic & Capacitor · Firebase · Native AR