Critter Git'Ers

Inspiration

A wild idea from creators Dale Three and Joseph Brancik, based loosely on the classic "whack-a-mole" format but turned up to 11 for modern social VR and mobile audiences.

What it does

Critter Git'Ers is a colorful and inviting game centered on ridding your farm of pesky critters. Each round becomes more difficult, with higher goals, more intense music, and quicker critters as the game progresses. It's designed to be madcap fun for all ages and skill levels, but a major challenge to complete.

How we built it

Visuals: Built the good ol' fashioned way, (literally) hand-crafted in VR with primitive shapes. Just like Grandma used to make.

Programming: 100% Typescript, including custom UI, gameplay mechanics, and critter animations.

Sound: Meta's Gen AI tools were leveraged to create a variety of compelling sound effects, from a vintage tractor starting up to that perfect anvil clank.

Skybox: Created with Meta's Gen AI tools.

Challenges we ran into

The original world was built to fit closely within simulation and object capacity limits. We had to carefully balance the intensity of the action against the player count and internet speeds, optimizing it for maximum fun while sacrificing as little as possible. This competition allowed us to revisit and bring more life to the environment, and extend the UI and gameplay mechanics to reach the mobile audience.

Accomplishments we're proud of

The initial environment was built in a day, and a month later Critter Git'Ers was featured in Horizon Central and highlighted on Horizon's official Instagram page.

The critter animations are fully procedural, built with Typescript.

A semi-hidden feature is that you can launch yourself into the air by jumping and striking a surface with your mallet. Our "Test Your Strength" anvil mini-game was a huge hit with VR players during our 1.0 release!

Our programmer was able to leverage the mobile camera APIs to create a fun main menu cinematic that shows off the environment and other people playing.

For this update, we created an XP progression system with 50 uniquely named ranks! Now you can work your way up to being a Corn Counter, a Chili Consultant, or even go for the Golden Mallet.

What we learned

We learned plenty, but for us it was more about the friendships we made along the way.

For our programmer blender93, it was his first project in Horizon built entirely in Typescript, which unlocked better performance and more advanced features from day 1.

What's next for Critter Git'Ers

We have a huge library of assets from our visual artists that's ready to be implemented, including new critters, giant "boss" enemies, and tons of unlockable mallets. The long-term vision is to add more variety to the rounds to lengthen play sessions, with different critters providing unique challenges. (Exploding hot chili pepper moles, anyone?)

What's next? These critters are bent on world domination! You'd better get in there and do something about it. Bring your friends. We've got mallets aplenty.

Built With

• genai
• primitives
• typescript