A planet in your living room.
Godly is focused on providing an intuitive sandbox to empower your creativity. Intuitive hand controls allow you to sculpt and decorate your planet, and interact with its inhabitants. Be a benevolent god by protecting and providing for your subjects, or wreak havoc by swirling up tornados, setting fires, or raining down meteors.
A living world
Your planet never sits still. Random events like UFO abductions and meteor showers keep you on your toes. Each inhabitant has their own personality, preferences, and needs that shape how they react to you and the world around them. Earn their love or teach them fear.
Inspiration
This is a game I've wanted to build since I got my first Rift dev kit 10 years ago. I tried many times to build it, but there were two major hold ups: my skills and the limited technology. MR wasn't even an idea yet. But a decade later I've gained the skills, solved the tough problems, and Meta has delivered the technology.
For this competition I dusted off the prototype and completely reimagined it with a hands first design philosophy.
How we built it
Godly leverages Meta's passthrough and hand tracking to deliver a seamless low friction experience. It's focused on delightful interaction and intuitive control. Application SpaceWarp provides the necessary headroom/frametime to both render and manage the rich simulation in Godly.
Challenges we ran into
Spheres are hard. There's a reason nobody attempts to put games on spheres. Nothing works out of the box. Which way is up? Depends! Godly features a fully bespoke orbital physics system, spherical navmesh generation and AI pathfinding, and efficient planetary sculpting. Each character has a complex emotion system, with preferences, needs, and fears.
What we learned
Hands are not automatically intuitive, but with thoughtful design they can make XR far more approachable to the average user. Consistently user testing on people who do not have significant XR experience is a great way to know if your interaction is actually intuitive, or just familiar to well versed users.
What's next
There's a key ingredient that had to be removed to deliver a polished experience before the deadline: Planetary Persistence. When Godly ships in 2026, users will feel like their planet is living even when the app is closed. Imagine a planetary tamagotchi. Users will be rewarded for tending their planet, and see the consequences when they let it languish.
The number of random events and available decorations/clothing items will be greatly expanded. The systems are built, now it's about filling it up.
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