Crafter vs Dodgers

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  Start at the UFO

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  Gorgeous mountain view!

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  Unique vertical arena

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  Incoming eggplant!

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  Dodge pizzas!

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  Solve Match 3 puzzle games

Inspiration

Crafter vs Dodgers fuses the charm of Match-3 puzzles with the heart-racing action of Bullet Hell games. This combo creates an extremely fun asymmetrical party game where players compete using different playstyles. The overall concept was sparked by this YouTube video of a runaway tire barreling down a hill. We chose food-themed items because we were inspired by the wildly successful mobile game, Candy Crush. Players just naturally connect with colorful, delicious objects! We adopted an endless round structure reminiscent of classic modded FPS servers that keeps the fun flowing without breaking the flow.

What it does

Play as the lone Crafter or join the Dodgers team! The Crafter tackles a Match-3 puzzle challenge, selecting three identical items in a row to launch them at opponents. With just seconds on the clock, they need to craft as many projectiles as possible before the role passes to one of the Dodgers. Dodgers must survive a Bullet Hell action game, avoiding both apple showers and the Crafter's projectiles.

The Crafter scores points by solving puzzles and landing hits, while Dodgers lose points when struck. The goal? Get the highest score as the roles keep rotating and the chaos continues!

How we built it

We started by studying photographs of epic mountains. This was key in designing a world that makes players feel small and vulnerable which amplifies the excitement. Perfecting the mountain's slope and item physics required careful balance: items needed to tumble naturally and quickly while creating just the right level of challenge for Dodgers. To accelerate our development in Meta Horizon, we used an AI assistant paired with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that ingested Meta's lengthy and comprehensive documentation. This helped us quickly understand the engine's capabilities and generate functional Typescript code while we focused on the important balance between the puzzle and action mini-games. Peter was the project lead and focused on level, audiovisual, and game design, as well as being the product owner and project manager. Nicholas was the lead engineer and focused on developing the majority of the logic and systems in our game. Roman was an engineer who added additional polish and helped us immensely with debugging efforts.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing the size and physical properties of very differently shaped food items was harder than we thought! Some naturally round items such as the cheese wheel required very different physical and size properties compared to something like the pizza slice due to how they moved down the mountain. A lot of time was spent balancing the game and its point accumulation and deduction system so that the game was fair to both Crafter and Dodgers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A major technical hurdle we experienced early on was figuring out how to spawn hundreds of objects constantly without tanking performance. Our solution was a custom object pooling system that pre-loads and hides all game items, recycling them as they tumble off the mountain. This especially helps new players joining mid-chaos. They see all tumbling items instantly instead of dodging invisible threats that slowly load in. We're proud that our game pushes Meta Horizon to its limits with what might be the platform's most complex dynamic object management system. Finally, all objects you see in the world were created using Meta Horizon's powerful Gen AI feature, which we think look pretty spectacular!

What we learned

Networking is delightfully easy in Meta Horizon. After working with Unity for two decades, we found the Horizon Desktop Editor to be refreshingly streamlined. It was a pleasant surprise we didn't expect. We also gained valuable experience implementing a RAG system, creating an AI assistant that helped us quickly master Horizon's powerful APIs, focused interaction mode, TypeScript, Leaderboards, and so much more. Our AI + RAG setup dramatically accelerated our learning and development, and we're excited to bring that newfound knowledge to our future games.

What's next for Crafter vs Dodgers

We'd like to add more fun (and delicious!) items to keep the game fresh for our most dedicated players. They can either earn these items by completing more Quests or buy them outright. This adds more unique items to each round while giving the Crafter more puzzles to solve. Dodgers who love to run ahead and take the spotlight can also buy flashy cosmetics that others can't help but notice. Power-ups that affect all Dodgers can also be added to bring them closer together, creating an even more social experience among them. Which heroic Dodger will risk their score to grab the power-up for the team? Finally, since Meta Horizon handles cross-platform so well, we're curious how our game might feel in VR. Dodging giant eggplants and pizzas with that immersive sense of scale could make this game very popular in VR!

Built With

• adobe
• affinity
• ai
• api
• blender
• camera-mode
• custom-ui
• focused-interaction
• gen-ai
• horizon-worlds
• leaderboard
• rag
• typescript