Five Minute Kingdoms

A chaotic hand-tracked mixed-reality tower-defense/building game where epic battles between absurd miniature factions unfold directly on your furniture, in bite-sized 5-minute challenges.

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Inspiration

As a kid, I played with action figures and toys, staging them in massive imaginary battles across my room and furniture, building fortresses for them out of books, boxes, and whatever junk I could find lying around and imagining what they really were. And then using rubber bands to slingshot them into each other for combat. Now as a middle-aged game jam addict who has done 160+ game jams in the past 10 years, (~30 games which are XR), I get to make that imaginary childhood game into reality for everyone to enjoy: mixed reality in a tactile hand-tracked wobbly physics-driven way, that is infused with absurdity, surrealism, and my low-poly charm.

Although this is an entirely new game made during this competition, with entirely new systems, new code, new mechanics, and design philosophy, it is inspired from lessons learned and failures across some of my recent XR jam experiments, and is kind of an intersection of all my 3rd-person XR Hand puppet games: Your Hand Is A Duck, Your Hand Is A Dragon, Home Is Where The Trash Is, Zero-G Nuclear Space Serpent; my XR physics-based building/construction games: Gingerbread Keep, Fortress of Bones, Your Hands Are Ghosts, Glow Up Garden; and my XR caterpillar-horde physics mechanics games: Writhe and Dine, My Best Friends Are Giant Mushrooms.

How we built it

Built in Unity using ECS/DOTS for performance with Meta's XR SDK and MRUK for room mapping. The core challenge was hitting 72fps with hundreds of simultaneous physics-driven units. I used entirely procedural animations with unskinned meshes driven by math and physics, custom collision detection for weapons.

I did reuse 5 very simple basic lowpoly bone meshes that I've reused across multiple different games (skull, pelvis, rib, long bone, short bone). In this game I was able to create bone defense pieces, the bone units, the bone puppet, and the walls/buildings using modified versions of the basic bone pieces as a building blocks in Blender. [Again, this is not an update of an existing game. This is just my asset library!] For the first time I used custom Python scripts for vertex coloring and ambient occlusion baking in blender, and the new version fo the Array modifier in the new Blender 5.0, really streamlining my lowpoly workflow, and targeting for Quest 3.

Challenges I ran into

Up until 3 days before the deadline, I was still going for 5 different factions in the game. But I realized I had to ruthlessly cut, and just focused entirely on polishing the Bonefolk faction instead of spreading effort across all 5 minute factions. The game was done using Unity's ECS/DOTS physics, which made everything 10x more difficult and time consuming. Performance optimization during intense battle scenes and wobbly-physics based building with breakable joints, all done by using ECS (and ASW), required constant iteration and experimentation. Quest 3 is real bottleneck compared to desktop. Getting the rubber band of the slingshot to wrap around a Unity ECS-based collider was difficult to say the least.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The game captures that tactile joy of playing with miniatures on real furniture. Units march across your actual desk and couch. The physics chaos of skeletal warriors and the well-fed Gourmound soldiers clashing together in battle, feels viscerally satisfying, and keeps surprising me with unintended realism in new unscripted ways only chaotic physics can offer. Try dropping a few Gourmound soldiers on a stack of bone warriors and watch how vicious it gets as the Gourmound gets pushed onto his side and rolled around, prodded by the spears. Most importantly, I finished a complete game loop within the competition timeline while maintaining the weird charm that makes my work recognizable.

What we learned

Finishing is more valuable than perfecting. Creating from love rather than fear produces better work, even under deadline pressure. Simple, direct solutions beat complex abstractions. Protecting must-have features while sacrificing nice-to-haves is essential for deliverable quality. And most of all, how important focus is, and blocking out distractions like social media and news.

What's next for Five Minute Kingdoms

Finishing the 4 remaining factions: King Gourmound's culinary-cannibal crusader themed warriors, Queen Umbra's climbing shadow caterpillar horde, The Nuts (nut-based faction with acorn/nut-based warriors), and The Overripe (horrid fruit based faction). The interactions between the 5 factions factorially will lead to some unpredicably interesting emergent gameplay. Add progression systems, more unit types, and environmental hazards (I want challenges where the floor is lava, or where it is snowing in your room, or it is flooded with water, with alligators and sharks.

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