CyberSnake™

Inspiration

We wanted to create a creative HoloLens experience that truly transformed your space and motivated the user to interact in fun, innovative (and silly!) ways. Re-imagining simple classics seemed like a good place to start, and our redesign of Snake turned out to be more engaging than it had any right to be (:

What it does

Upon starting the game, the user is prompted to scan their space. Using the Hololens's Spatial Mapping sensors and some scripts that we wrote, we were able to get a full understanding of the user's space and automatically create a custom play area specific to your surroundings by analyzing the normals of the spatial mesh with raycasts and calculating which areas of the room find themselves empty.

After scanning and generating the playspace, the user can play the game. Users must use their head to collect CyberCubes™ while at the same time avoiding the ever-growing CyberTail™ that follows them. Other special pickups are also available, like the CyberMotivationalVortex™, which attracts all of the surrounding cubes into a single point in space if you say a motivational quote (and explodes, transforming the colors of the space completely), and the CyberGravityPull™, which can help you get out of sticky situations by dropping all of the CyberTail™ spheres on the ground for a few seconds.

The game also has a number of easter eggs and voice commands that can be used to enhance your CyberExperience™. Try saying "Samuel Jackson", for instance. Bonus points for whoever discovers the others.

How I built it

Unity, Hololens, C#, coding, caffeine, sheer will.

Challenges I ran into

Discovering meaningful interactions for the HoloLens is always a challenge given its limited input. Because the documentation on HoloLens development (specially with things like SpatialMapping) is so limited, we also had to develop a lot of our own technology to get the desired final result.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It looks polished and it's very fun to play - we also got to design a lot of our own sound effects, assets, easter eggs and interactions. The gameplay loop is simple but has depth.

What I learned

Mixed Reality is TheFuture™, a bunch of Unity and HoloLens development tricks, sound design discoveries and also what are the things that make a HoloLens interaction fun