Cozy Cove - Island Home

Inspiration

Cozy Cove - Island Home is inspired by games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Stardew Valley. Thematically it’s inspired by movies like Moana and leans into the Meta Avatars’ Pixar-esque aesthetic.

What it does

Cozy Cove is a casual and delightful life simulation mobile game that lets players of all ages play the role of a new citizen to the island town, who can gather resources, meet locals and upgrade their home entirely at their own pace.

How we built it

I built the core mechanics in a minimal world, using mobile-first features including scripted movement and focused interaction to create the Tap-To-Move mechanic. I made heavy use of the Camera API, zooming in for NPC interactions, while giving a semi-isometric effect for world navigation.

With the mechanics in place, I built out the tile-based map from available tile assets, then added GenAI-created meshes for important structures such as the statue in the town center. I used Github Copilot in VS Code to speed up the scripting as the integration is much faster and more accurate than the Horizon code assistant.

Since I’m a game developer who has previously experimented with using Noesis, I was able to implement UI that feels polished and performant. I really appreciated the Noesis integration. Copilot helped a lot here once I'd provided enough reference material.

Challenges we ran into

I set my game to allow 4 players, and have verified that visiting a friend's house works in editor, but there's a bug that sometimes prevents 2 players joining the published game together. At these times, the Join button is greyed out
Bugs in the camera API meant I had to use a lot of workarounds to make it feel as smooth as it does, such as clearing and re-subscribing to focused interaction inputs after drag or pinch gestures

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I creatively used Noesis UI to fill the top portion of the mobile screen with animated game branding above the response resource UI, seamlessly blending from 2D artwork into the game world
The game builds on Tap To Move, enabling tapping to interact with NPCs, pinching to zoom in and out, and a movement indicator to aid player comprehension
The UI is accessible, responsive and polished. By perfectly fitting to various mobile screen sizes it's both visually appealing and immersive

What we learned

Lighting is difficult in Horizon Worlds, so it's better to embrace that and go with a simplistic style
Animated NPCs with text to speech and lip sync are really engaging and easy to set up - I'll definitely use these in more games

What's next for Cozy Cove - Island Home

Add a social trading post so that you can trade resources directly with other players to enhance social connectivity
Add more NPCs with a new resource types, environments, furniture and quests
Set up a compass UI on the HUD to point towards your next quest, supporting seamless gameplay
Implement a top-down furniture dragging system using the gestures API to let you truly decorate your home however you like