Disco Flip

Title Art
Main Menu
Puzzle with Steam Train
Dance Floor Puzzle
Explore Mode
Challenges and Rankings

Inspiration

The inspiration for Disco Flip comes from a Mixed Reality prototype we once made in Unity, which would spawn turnstiles in the players living room and dynamically create a workable puzzle from their open floor space. It worked well, but we knew many players wouldn't have enough floor space to get a proper variety of puzzles, and the market for Mixed Reality exclusive games might be limiting, but from that experiment Disco Flip was born.

Disco Flip takes the best parts of the idea and adds fun funky disco music to the mix, solidifying it as a great and addicting mobile title, where players can dig in to the tight puzzle game-loop, running time trials and competing for high scores.

What it does

The main puzzle concept of Disco Flip is to flip on and off the three music tracks, Drums, Bass, and Guitar/Keys. When all three tracks are on at the same time, strings and synths also get added. With all three tracks enabled, players must reach the Disco Ball goal to solve the puzzle, avoiding obstacles along the way

Disco Flip features 50+ levels, an in-game Fashion store, Leaderboards and Quests, and an Explore mode where players can venture through the disco club and take in the vibes.

How we built it

Horizon Worlds, Typescript, Noesis Studio, Houdini Indie (for texturing and game art). Horizon's GenAI Mesh Generation, and Sound Generation.

Central to the game are the Tap-To-Move API, and Portrait API - the game couldnt exist without either of these two, they're terrific additions to the Horizon Worlds codebase. We also used Meta's NPCs to serve as the games dance troupe.

Challenges we ran into

Learning Noesis and its UI paradigms. Creating puzzles was a challenge, where puzzles need to be very dependable in their design and execution. A puzzle that doesnt work, or is too easy/exploitable makes or breaks the fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of making a puzzle game with a lot of content, as its not a genre I've done before. I think i really succeeded in capturing the essence of 1970's Disco in the games look and feel which wasnt easy; theres a fine line between tacky and stylish.

What we learned

I learnt all about UI programming from a Noesis standpoint, also using Portrait and Tap-To-Move features.

What's next for Disco Flip

The Puzzle/Music genre combo proved to be really engaging and immersive. We would love to add to the musical palette and explore other genres such as K-Pop either as DLC for Disco Flip or as K-FLIP or similar.

We'd love to further enhance the game's social aspect further, join your friends and join in the dance troupe, or sabotage the puzzle player with additional obstacles. Or just hang out in the club together.

We'd love to support VR properly, it works already experimentally but it wasnt a focus for this contest. With some minimal changes I think we could do it.