Beyond the Walls

Inspiration

I was inspired by a love for survival co-op games like Call of Duty: Zombies, the progression and village-building of Clash of Clans, and the immersive defense dynamics of BedWars. I wanted to build a gameplay system with thoughtful long-term progression while also enabling players of any skill level to play with each other. The co-op design fit this well, and the Horizon Worlds experience allows for social entertainment during the grind between players with the same goal.

What it does

Beyond the Walls is a co-op survival game where players work together to defend a walled fort against relentless zombie attacks. As they make their way towards you, players can venture outside to gather resources like wood and stone from the surrounding wilderness to upgrade weapons, cannons, and more. With players being able to drop in at any-time, progression is tied to persistent and personal weapon upgrades that will give returning players an edge while inspiring the rest of their teams. Those brave enough to fight the hordes head on will find themselves rewarded with powerful loot and abilities. They will certainly need it, as difficulty increases continuously with every zombie killed. With such continuous scaling of gameplay challenges, players must work together to strategically upgrade their fort and gear because if a zombie makes it through to the town hall, it's game over.

How I built it

The landscape, trees, towers, and town hall were modeled in Blender with a focus on small textures, minimal vertices, and a cohesive stylized design. Most of the textures used are single color PBR materials that are only 32px. The mountain was generated with Meta's Gen AI mesh tools, and the anvil, cannon and rock models are from https://market.pmnd.rs/ under CC0 public domain.

Challenges I ran into

I didn't have enough time to finish implementation unfortunately, as I spent most of my time on gameplay and art design. I had some issues with figuring out networking events and managing multi-player logic, but I hope to finish this project after the judging period ends.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of the iterative optimizations I made with regards to performance by using raycasted hit detection for the pickaxe, as well as numerous improvements to polygon count and graphical fidelity. I'm also proud of improving my understanding of real-time networking, as I learned to perform operations locally and send events only when the world state updates.

What I learned

I learnt a lot about efficient systems design and reusable code structure, as well as general rendering and graphics skills and optimizations useful for general 3d rasterized game development.

What's next for Beyond the Walls

I hope to implement the detailed features and provide a fun and engaging experience to Meta Horizon users in the future. I also hope to see if I can translate some mobile-only features to VR on the Quest 3S.

Built With

• typescript