Holomatrix Meltdown

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Inspiration

In the original implementation of the game, the player races around a large Old-West themed environment, climbing over rocks, ramps, and old mining tracks in an effort to jump through a series of rings while being timed. However, that sort of gameplay didn’t really lend itself to creating a progressive gameplay experience. So, I completely re-worked the gameplay to create a mission-based gameplay environment, using Persistent Variables to track the player’s progression, as well as adding some nice cut scene visuals to reward and motivate the player. I also use the mission progression to open up new areas for the player to learn.

What it does

Regarding increasing player engagement - the advantage of modifying the world with a mission-based focus, which primarily focuses on identifying and collecting resources – is that the player is presented with an underlying story. As each mission is finished, just a little more progressive elements of the story are revealed, gradually revealing to the player what was behind the incident in the Holomatrix, and also explaining to them why the missions they’re being tasked with help to solve the problem. On the technical side I’m using a JSON-based database to populate the mission and dialogue elements. This gives me the ability to continue to update the underlying data without having the re-publish the game.

How we built it

Once again I used Unity to construct the vast majority of the world since it's the tool I'm most familiar with. Once I was satisfied with the results, I could bake the meshes, simplify them, and export them easily into the HWDE.

Challenges we ran into

Time (lack of). And of course the worst flood we've seen locally in 38 years - that was challenging. My wife and I have already structured our lives to do a lot of volunteer work, so the past two weeks we've been running non-stop. I just didn't have enough time to accomplish what I wanted. But in the next few weeks I'll see what I can do...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I maintained the original Old West theme – in part because I like the stark visual contrast between the small SciFi themed entry–point, and opening up into a massive colorful desert environment. In addition, the old west style allows me to keep the vertice count low. In fact, the original world was pretty big, but this time around I re-structured the world to allow for progressive areas of exploration to reward player engagement. I was also able to simplify some of the meshes, so although the world wound up being much larger, I was able to reduce the vertices by about 30%, and the vast majority of the world is only using two textures to paint it. That was very gratifying.

What we learned

Once again I have to give credit where it’s due – the Gen AI tools – in particular the scripting engines have been amazingly helpful. I couldn’t have done this without them. I discovered I could work with the engines by just asking questions, like 'What is this line code actually doing?' and get a very instructive reply. Maybe it's just me, but the engines seem much better dialed-in the past month or so.

What's next for Holomatrix Meltdown

There are several other elements I wanted to add – for example, secret areas with hidden research logs from the missing professor, aggressive robots that would impede the players progress, and timed missions - but I simply ran out time. My family lives at the heart of area affected by the July 4th flooding in Texas, so the past couple of weeks my time has been extremely limited. So – some of the ideas I want to implement are going to have to wait for a little bit. On the other side of the coin, the time spent in development was highly therapeutic.