Airspace Defender

💡 Inspiration

Arcade classics like Missile Command, of course! But we also took inspiration from elegant hit mobile games like Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope that focused on a single, tactile input verb. We wondered... what is the simplest native verb in hand-tracking MR? How can we recreate that point-and-click feeling, in 3D?

🎲 What it does

Enter the war room! Pinch anywhere in the airspace to launch a missile. When it reaches its destination, it leaves a lingering volumetric explosion, and can cause chain reactions. But be careful! Your launchers take time to reload, so you'll have to be strategic about where and when to launch. Defend your city!

🚧 How we built it

We built it in Unity using Meta's MR Utility Kit and Building Blocks, over the course of 3 days collaborating in-person.

⚔️ Challenges we ran into

The first iteration of the design completely missed what made Missile Command so intuitive and fun. Instead of "point and click" pinch targeting, we were using "pinch and drag", which was difficult and slow to aim. It works for Angry Birds, where the player has unlimited time to evaluate their targeting, but it was awful in an action game. Only on the last day did we pivot to the far superior current input model, which also allowed us to increase the frenetic action of the gameplay.

✨ Accomplishments that we're proud of

Players reach the skill level where they are thinking strategically very early, which seems like a good sign. Additionally, the gameplay has a self-balancing quality, where as the player loses buildings the enemy missiles appear to concentrate themselves more, which created tense moments before we had even tried to tune the difficulty.

Finally, the 3rd dimension really works for this type of game, as it turns out. Leaning around your buildings to pick the perfect angle; arranging chain reactions for missiles coming from 3 different directions...

🎓 What we learned

The Horizon OS UX in 2024 already feels sufficiently frictionless to support Casual MR gaming, where players can quickly jump in MR to do a short (e.g. <10min) game run without having to use controllers. In parallel to that, the Presence Platform MR features already allow for the creation of MR Tabletop games. These 2 insights played a key role in our choice to build a Casual MR Tabletop game.