Boba Cats Valley

Overview of the valley
A view of the main village square
Visitors can hang out at the cafe tables
A tea shop in the village square
Your resource stash as the tea shop
View Towards Town from Ice Cube Canyon
Sugar Caverns

Inspiration

Inspired by our love of bubble tea and cats, the foraging and resource gathering mechanics in the Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing games, and the aesthetics and world design of similar cozy games.

What it does

This is designed as a cozy incremental styled game that blends in crafting/resource gathering mechanics, platforming and exploration. It is designed to support primarily Mobile and PC controls for Horizon Worlds

How we built it

We started with the Tycoon Template project provided by Meta in the Horizon Editor and then heavily edited to our needs, adding code for the tea crafting and resource gathering. We also brought in the AI NPC code provided by Meta and some other samples. We used the GenAI features in editor to create most of the 3D meshes.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to work in the Horizon Editor is brand new to us so there was a lot of trial by fire, doing tutorials and exploring existing worlds, templates and assets to learn how it worked. We also explored using AI NPCs. We started several learning worlds before coalescing on this final world. Sometimes the editor had issues due to the always online nature, and it was new to us as well learning how to work without traditional source control for development. The Horizon World Editor AI tools are only available in a limited set of countries - and two of our team members were not able to use them. However we figured out work arounds to this by either using alternate AI solutions, or having the main Horizon Editor AI features used by team members with access to them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Part of the challenge was to use AI in the project and we were able to leverage the embedded AI tools in the Horizon Editor very effectively for art asset generation for most of the art within the game. It was relatively easy to use and we felt that it was able to provide a fun appearance to the art assets in our world that we envisioned bringing a fantasy interaction to Boba tea themes.

What we learned

We learned about the Horizon Editor and Horizon Worlds ecosystem, many of the resources available to developers, and how to leverage AI in creation of content.

What's next for Boba Cats Valley

We were very inspired working with these tools and the potential for expanding the world with more types of interactions and layering the kinds of experience players are looking for in Horizon Worlds and similar platforms. We would like to further develop the world so that there is a larger environment to explore, with more types of resources and upgrade-able items to unlock, recipes to craft, and a way for players to more directly customize and upgrade their own Tea Shop. Additionally we can envision additional minigame interactions that would fit within the world theme. We have observed how other world creators link together different worlds around a central theme and can see the Boba Cats Valley being rife with potential to do the same. We also want to make sure the game is equally enjoyable in VR, and that the NPC AI features have a fall back for users that can not use them in Horizon.