Buzz Brawl

Buzz Brawl
Glide Dodge Dominate
The hive becomes a battlefield
Fight Ends - Fun Doesn't!
Buzz into Battle fun

Inspiration

Buzz Brawl began with two simple inspirations that stayed with us for years. The first was the flying battle game, fast, fun aerial combat that made us wonder what a modern version could feel like. The second inspiration came from the Bee Movie. Its vibrant hive world and exaggerated scale pushed us to imagine a stylised environment seen from a bee’s perspective. Combining these two influences, we set out to build a high-speed honeybee aerial combat game that is simple to learn, satisfying to play, and visually memorable.

What it does

Buzz Brawl is a multiplayer aerial shooter where players ride battle bees inside a massive hive arena. Over a 5-minute match, players fly, shoot, collect pickups, and try to score the highest number of kills. Players can:

Fly freely through the hive using a smooth pitch–yaw–throttle system
Shoot opponents and earn points with each kill
Collect health, ammo, boost, and shield pickups mid-flight
Engage in continuous combat through a respawn loop
Track performance with an in-game leaderboard
Join a new session instantly after each match

How we built it

We built using TypeScript inside the Meta Horizon desktop world editor, with support for the mobile platform. The game runs on the Meta Horizon Platform, using persistent storage for player data. To shape gameplay, we integrated multiple Meta APIs: NoesisGUI, Nav Mesh, Analytics, Camera, Performance, and UI, each helping refine movement, navigation, combat, and polish.

Challenges we ran into

Giving up traditional flight physics was tough but necessary. The vector-based approach required many iterations before it felt right. Targeting was another major challenge—we adjusted the bee’s bounding box and collision logic to make hits feel fair. Optimizing high-speed gameplay on mobile, especially with heat and performance limitations, remains an ongoing challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we turned a simple “bee combat” concept into a smooth and competitive multiplayer game. After many early prototypes, we finally built a custom flight system that feels natural and responsive on mobile. We successfully implemented a full gameplay loop of spawning, flying, shooting, collecting power-ups, dying, respawning, and updating scores, all running consistently inside Horizon Worlds.

What we learned

We learned that even a simple idea—flying and shooting—becomes complex when executed with speed and precision. Designing a responsive aerial movement system taught us a lot about vectors, smoothing, feedback, and user perception. We also learned how stylised visuals can attract players and improve readability in fast-paced gameplay. Performance optimisation, level structure, and pickup visibility were all major learning moments throughout development.