Ant Smasher

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  Ant Smasher. New Meta Horizon Worlds Experience

Inspiration

What inspired me with this project was a combination of two of my favorite films, “Honey I shrunk the kids” and “Toy Story” I always loved the idea of being shrunk down to the size of an insect, seeing the world from that tiny perspective and embarking on an all out battle with the animal kingdom.

What it does

Currently Ant Smasher is a wave based defense game where the player has to defend a piece of birthday cake that was dropped to the floor, when you and your friends were shrunken, from an army of ants marching to eat it. Currently you can select from 3 difficulty levels and then load into the game area where you have 3 minutes to run over and step or jump on as many ants, squishing them before they get to the cake. If you prevent at at least 20 ants from getting to the cake, you win and activate the winning music and get leaderboard scores. If not then the ants eat the cake in front of you and you are prompted to try again.

How we built it

This project was built all inside of the horizons build menu using primitive shapes and code blocks. The mechanics required for this game didn’t require typescript to accomplish the objectives I set out to achieve, so I just build the whole game with in app creative tools.

Challenges we ran into

I would say some of the challenges I faced in this contest was trying to get the scaling correct so that way it looked and felt good for mobile, but also I didn’t want to sacrifice the vr experience as well either. So trying to find that sweet spot was one challenge.

Another challenge was trying to get the gameplay working where it feels just as fun and satisfying on mobile as it does in vr. And then balancing the difficulty levels so that there is just enough variety to satisfy whatever mood the mobile gamer is in. Whether that be they just want to casually run around and smash some ants in the easy mode, or to create a nice challenging experience in the harder modes that they need to bring their friends in with them to work together to beat the harder difficuies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think the first accomplishment I was proud of, was once I got the ants animated and moving towards the cake in sequence, just watching the field of ants marching together I feel looks really good. I feel like it gives just the right amount of panic to the gamer to not be able to run into action, and it was how I was hoping it would play out in my head when I thought of the idea.

Also I really like how clean the game loop works and all the sound effects and elements that really give it a full and complete feeling. Whether you win, and then get the win music with the fireworks in the background. Or if you loose and get the cake eating animation, either way it feels like the player gains something from the experience either way.

What we learned

I think the major thing I learned was how to think about making content for mobile and finding little tricks that are subtle but make something that looks or works great in vr, but then also work well for mobile as well. Making a game targeted for mobile made me approach the project in a different mindset, which now that I have done that, opens my mind up to other ideas to continue including mobile content for new projects, but also helped me realize how to convert certain elements in my existing titles to make them mobile ready as well.

What's next for Ant Smasher

So Ant Smasher isn’t done. Because of the time crunch for the competition, I wanted to demonstrate the core mechanics of the game and make sure they were solid and working well for the deadline. And so that’s why currently I have 3 difficulty modes available currently. But the plan after the competition is over is to add a continuous wave mode to create more of an incentive to continue coming back to Ant Smasher. I want the players to keep returning to see how far up the wave ladder they can achieve, battling to be top of the leaderboards.

Also I plan to introduce “ant bucks” a currency system into Ant Smasher. The way it will work is that for every ant smashed the player gets one ant buck. I will also create a store so that way the player can use their ant bucks to purchase weapon or speed upgrades that will assist them in being able to beat harder waves and climb even higher up the leaderboard. There will also be IWP included in this store so if the player chooses to purchase ant bucks to save them time, they can do so as well.

These are the main plans I have at the moment set for Ant Smasher to hopefully create a much more retentive experience and make this game one of the go to vr and mobile experiences players want to continue to come back to week after week.

Built With

• codeblocks
• horizons