Dungeon Crawling Core

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  battling cursed statues

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  the dungeon entrance

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  more monsters

Inspiration

I love games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls. I really wanted to push the boundaries of what Horizon Worlds could do and create a highly remixable dungeon crawling experience that anyone can pick up and build from. I also wanted to use AI to generate meshes for monsters and then animate them myself.

What it does

• Adds a library of monsters with basic behaviour to chase and attack players who are nearest them. The monsters stats can be easily modified without knowing how to code
• Utilizes player events to add weapons whose stats can be modified again without knowing how to code. Just copy the template and paste. Weapons can block, have regular or even a powerful attack.
• Adds basic dungeon puzzles
• Links this up together with code that handles player damage, monster attacks, and more.

How we built it

I built off of the open source Part Based Animation system by Todd Roberts adding more functionality that allows remixers to change things like how or when an animation triggers a method. With this system I was able to use Horizons AI to generate meshes for monsters, export them to blender, separate into pieces, and create animations before bringing them back to Horizon.

It was pretty amazing to have a great looking model and then see it come alive.

To enable AI, damage, and monster death I relied quite heavily on Horizons 'Chop'n'Pop' PvE game which was a great help learning about network events and tying different pieces of code together.

Challenges we ran into

Using the Part Based Animation system required a lot of changes to it and there was a major challenge when exporting animations from Blender back to Horizon. The problem there arose when bone names were not lining up with animation ones and it took a lot of debugging and trial and error to solve the issue; renaming bones manually in Blender before exporting the animations.

In Horizon there were difficulties with learning the networking like when my weapon object was not able to find the static singleton instance of the Game Manager but this was solved by relying on Network Events when I really needed them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Generating AI assets, animating them in a non-standard way via the part system, and bringing them back in. I'm also very proud of the combat system which has more than one type of attack and can be quite fun and challenging.

What we learned

Networking, Using the AI generator, Animating parts, Having objects communicate with each other.

What's next for Dungeon Crawling Core

It needs a spell system, archery, inventory (especially loot!) and of course more monsters. I want to have the world be remixable giving players everything they need to create their own dungeon adventures.

Built With

• typescript