Fairway Fury

Drive fast, scoop balls, fire cannons—only humans can handle this!

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Inspiration

The three of us work together regularly as creators, on multiple ongoing projects, within Horizon Worlds. A week ago, we were chatting in Dale's Farm, reminiscing about old TV shows, when we were reminded of a particular Monster Garage episode where a Porche was converted into a golf ball collector that could shoot the balls back. We immediately thought this sounded like something fun to build, even if it was not for the contest.

As I had been working on a prototype driving mechanic which allowed a relaxed driving experience on both VR and mobile, Dale is a prolific builder of vehicles, who is always looking for new projects and QueenStickii loves architecture, aesthetics, and lighting, we jumped at the chance to combine our skills and create a golf-resort themed game. We settled on a mid-century Americana aesthetic, based on a Palm Springs or Orlando-style golf resort, with vintage pastel colors. This original concept allowed us plenty of room to maneuver, eventually evolving into a retro-futurism theme as we progressed and found ourselves looking for ways to save capacity and work with available NPCs and tools to ensure players would have the best experience possible.

How we built it:

Pure determination and playing skillsets. With only 7 days until the end of the contest, we elected to stick with what were are best at and built the world with Horizon World's native primitive shapes. I started with altering the scripting on my driving mechanic for the vehicle, and tried to reduce the chance of the player sliding back as they drove at faster speeds. I did this by shifting the seat gizmo forward, based on speed. From a construction and environmental stand point, Queen took inspiration from her knowledge of architectural design eras. Working with Dale, who has a broad knowledge of US geography and nostalgia, they combined skills to develop the world itself.

Challenges:

The most difficult challenge to overcome, was the time remaining to complete this build and submit it to this contest. We will discuss this aspect in the next section.

Architecturally, the geometry of the main building was challenging, given the unusual angles and planes within the construction. Creating a cohesive aesthetic across the entire build is always challenging with revisions being made along the way to suit the evolution of the build and the available tools. The UI tool was extremely useful in this process, as it allowed us to save capacity where we would previously have had to use objects and geometric complexity, and bring in graphics not previously available to us.

From a programming perspective there were challenges with the local PlayerControls within the API as it would inconsistently not register bindings. To meet the deadline the controls were simplified to those available from codeblock events.

Accomplishments:

As aforementioned, the greatest challenge was the time we had to complete our project. While we had planned to work together at the beginning of the contest, other projects took precedence and as complex thinkers, our many ideas did not seem possible in the timescale. This idea came to us late in the process.

We overcame the short time available by relying on our history of building together, focusing on what we are best at as individual creators, and understanding the strengths of the others on the team. Also being non-precious about particular components and trusting each other to do what is best for the build, is a skillset we have developed through collaborating together previously. This allowed us to exhibit excellent time management and work together to meet this deadline. While there are many cosmetic aspects which we are pleased with, overall, our work ethic and team synergy is what has ultimately brought this project to fruition, and therefore is what we are most proud of.

Next Steps:

Our primary focus will be providing cosmetic options and vehicle upgrades, including different models and colour sets. We will also be implementing additional music by incorporating user selectable radio stations to switch between genres of AI generated music tracks. If possible we would also like to return to a more natural user experience through the use of the PlayerControl API, which will take longer to develop than we had available. We would also like to implement silly, fun and chaotic achievements such as breaking all the lights or crashing vehicles (along with effects), to bring users back to the game again and again to earn or purchase fun add-ons, in line with the concept of working at a crazy, futuristic and haphazardly-run workplace. There is also a bug that needs to be fixed where the first time a VR user grabs the steering wheel it steers like a mobile device using the camera API which should not be possible.

Built With

  • codeblocks
  • copilot
  • dall-e
  • horizon/camera
  • horizon/core
  • horizon/ui
  • horizon/unity-asset-bundles
  • suno
  • typescript
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