Replit highlighted the story of Ruth Heasman, a designer with no programming background who built and shipped an augmented reality ghost hunting game called SpookSeek AR using the company’s AI-powered platform — all in a single week. The case study, published on the Replit blog on February 27 and promoted through a LinkedIn builder spotlight event on February 28, underscores the company’s ambitions to make software development accessible to non-engineers.
From “Really Clueless” to a Working AR Game
Heasman describes herself as someone who started “really clueless” about 3D math and AR development stacks. A designer by trade, she entered Replit’s mobile Buildathon with an ambitious goal: build a game that used as many phone hardware features as possible, including the camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, and haptics.
The result was SpookSeek AR, a game in which players move through their real-world surroundings using their phone as a viewfinder to track and capture ghosts. Captured spirits appear in a bestiary as holographic-style collectible cards. Rather than opting for a simpler project, Heasman pushed for a fully shippable iOS app, progressing from concept to a live TestFlight build during the competition.
The technical challenge was considerable. Because Expo did not support Apple’s ARKit in the workflow she needed, Heasman and Replit Agent built a custom 3D rendering system from scratch using Three.js, projecting ghosts onto a virtual sphere around the player and building custom Fresnel-style shaders to give them a translucent, glowing appearance. “Basically, I had to get the agent to build me, like, an entirely bespoke 3D system,” she said.
Replit’s Play for Non-Traditional Builders
The SpookSeek AR story is part of a broader push by Replit to position itself as a platform for people beyond traditional developers. Heasman has built more than 20 apps on Replit over the past year, climbing into what the company describes as the top 0.1 percent of its builders. On LinkedIn, Replit’s Manny Bernabe called the combination of “determination plus Replit Agent” unstoppable, noting that Heasman built the full AR game including a custom game engine in one week.
The company has also recently partnered with LinkedIn to offer skill certifications for its platform, and has rolled out new pricing tiers including a Pro plan aimed at power users. For Heasman, the appeal is practical: she has tried other platforms but says “all the other platforms that I tried are deficient in some way,” particularly when it comes to bundling databases, storage, authentication, and deployment in one place.
Reference – blog.replit.com
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