BRAINROT Labs

The lab in Blender
so much rizz
In action - early stages of the game
Photobooth with a (very dumb) overlay

Inspiration

It's hard not to be inspired when you see a shark wearing trainers. This is a celebration of the frivolous, unchallenging, nonsensical fun that is Italian Brainrot.

What it does

BRAINROT Labs is a clicker - or rather a tapper since we're focusing on mobile genre. The player researches the various brainrot characters by tapping and purchasing upgrades to increase their tapping power. There are 6 characters to discover as well as a set-piece ending to conclude the origin story of the Italian Brainrot.

How we built it

To accomodate the fact that a clicker will naturally have a lot of input events, I kept many of the systems local to the player to avoid delays from communicating over a network or getting throttled from firing events too frequently.

The environment was built using blender, I baked the lighting on most of the models before bringing it into Horizon. I think this workflow works incredibly well for interior spaces and compliments Horizon's lighting system nicely.

This project ended up with a lot more code than I anticipated, echoing the detail that was applied to make interactions as juicy as possible.

Challenges we ran into

Generally optimising UI animations. I've came quite a way but it's not buttery smooth yet, nor may it ever be! If this is the place to namedrop Desktop Editor Feedback Report #1095295015781247 then that was possibly my biggest challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a software engineer breaking into tech art, I am proud of the progress I have made with the environment. I love how the AI-generated music works with the gameplay to really hammer home the absurdity of the experience - but don't love how I walk round the house singing "Tralalero Tralala".

What we learned

Developing for Horizon has such a quick turnaround time - the delay between initial concept and player feedback is so much shorter than in traditional game development. This tends to allow me to review more quickly and generally improves my design skills much faster!

What's next for BRAINROT Labs

I'd love to add more wearable content, I think the ending where you become one with Tung Tung is great - it would be funny if you and your friends could all run around wearing different characters you've unlocked! Should the userbase pick up then I'll look to extend the game upwards to support players who have completed all existing content. I've opened this world up to be remixable by the wider Horizon Worlds creator community, I hope to see developers engage with this world and use or learn from the features developed in their own worlds.