RIVAL ROBBERS

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  Title

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  Main Stage

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  Wireframe exaple

Inspiration

RIVAL ROBBERS was inspired by such amazing party games as Moving Out and Tools-Up (and partially Overcooked), where you and your friends play as a loaders or renovators to complete the tasks on time. However while in these games you team up with your friends to get the job done, we decided to add competing with your friends instead of teaming up to give players more space and motivation for social interactivity and increase overall dynamics of the match! To add even more variability we decided to give players various boosters which either help them to loot the map or hider their opponents (or mess with everyone to add some fun)! Grab the most of the valuables you can, mess up with your friends speed, scale and movement and have fun!

How we built it

Since mobile players often are looking for a shorter gameplay experience we've decided to make quick and straightforward yet engaging mechanics with simple controls for Rival Robbers. Players can easily jump into the fun, engage with the World right away and quickly accomplish the match, so that even average mobile gaming session of 2-5 minutes would give the user both fun and sense of accomplishment. Rival Robbers reset after the match and get users back to the lobby, so if user wants to stay for longer, they can launch the next round from the lobby right after finishing the previous one. So the world is equally fiе both for short and long game sessions.

The level and the lobby have been designed, textured and packed separately in the Cinema 4D+Unreal Engine. The goal was to keep the polycount/vertexcount, topology, materials and object count on the optimal level for mobile devices, yet to achieve attractive overall visual quality of the final scene and keep attention to the details. After that we have imported in the Horizon Desktop Editor and binded with the logic, scripts and mechanics. Additionally we've manually went through each object in the scene to decide which of these would be collidable (either by everything, or by object, or by players) and which wouldn't in order to decrease load on users' devices and increase overall performance across mobile. Last, but not the least was shading - we've optimized all objects and re-build and retopologized some to achieve great visuals and shading and decrease the amount of possible shading artifacts.

The core mechanics and scripts have been built directly in the Horizon Desktop Editor with the help of on official documentation and tutorials from Meta Developers website.

Challenges

This is our first Horizon World, so honestly speaking all the development of this World was quite a challenge! Figuring out how everything works, how entities, object, gizmos and events communicate with each other, how players and their data used across each stage of the world, how to handle data of players who quit during the play stage - everything was challenging to handle since this was the first time we've encountered Horizon Worlds. Nevertheless we did great!

Accomplishments

We are incredibly proud that having zero knowledge in Horizon World we've managed to build the world with great visuals which runs smoothly even on lower-end mobile devices. This is our first game, yet it has solid, stable and bugless structure. And with that game is also easy-to-go, intuitive to play, adapted both for short and long sessions, and relies on social fun and simple controls what makes it optimal for mobile gaming!

Next steps for RIVAL ROBBERS

Our world has incredible opportunities for scaling, so as the next steps we plan to SCALE! Like:

• Add more boosters that help player or hinder their rivals;
• Add grabbable guns (stun gun, drop-the-item gun, push gun, freeze gun, etc) which would randomly appear here and there on the map;
• Add more levels each with unique design and style, as well as the loot matching level's visuals;
• Add modes, like "Play only 1 specific map", "Play 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 maps in a row", "Play 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 random maps";
• Add progressing score system for the modes with several maps, so that after each map completion players would get score related to how much loot they've collected on the previous level, and each next level would give more score for the loot to motivate players win the maps even if they've lost previous couple;
• Add player's perks for the modes with several maps. So completion of each map in the mode would give each player option to choose constant perk for rest of the maps. Like "immune to [gun_name] guns", "5-10% speed increase", "10-20% jump height increase", "spawn with [gun_name] gun", etc

Built With

• horizon
• typescript