Horizon Heroes

Inspiration

Horizon Heroes was born out of a deep admiration for Epic Games' Paragon, a title that defined high-intensity, third-person action MOBA combat. However, high-end MOBAs typically demand massive client downloads, high-end hardware rigs, and heavy bandwidth. The driving vision was to distill that exact depth, strategic tension, and fluid tactical combat into a frictionless, low-bandwidth, mobile-first experience accessible instantly via the web.

What it does

Horizon Heroes is a fast-paced single player action-strategy MOBA prototype built for competitive mobile and web play. Key mechanics include:

A single wide-lane map layout designed to compress spatial awareness and heighten engagement frequency.

A cooperative Critical Ball tower takedown system that replaces slow, passive lane farming with aggressive, team-based objective control.

Dynamic camera perspectives supporting both isometric and first-person tactical modes.

Intelligent AI enemy heroes and squadmates, alongside multi-phase lane boss encounters

How we built it

The project was built utilizing a high-performance Three.js WebGL stack tailored for mobile-first rendering efficiency:Environment & Optimization: Leveraged procedural terrain generation and distance-based Level of Detail (LOD) foliage algorithms to keep draw calls low. Programmed behavior trees and obstacle-avoidance pathfinding loops for non-player characters to maintain balanced solo and squad skirmishes. UI/UX Layer: Developed a lightweight, responsive HUD overlay tracking real-time health, sprint stamina depletion, and match objective telemetry.

Challenges we ran into

Mobile Performance Constraints: Maintaining a stable target frame rate on mobile web browsers while rendering particle-heavy ability casts, dynamic shadows, and boss animations required aggressive asset compression and shader optimization. Touch Control Ergonomics: Balancing multi-touch virtual joysticks with camera switching made it challenging to prevent accidental input fatigue during high-stress team fights.Bandwidth Budgets: Keeping initial asset payload sizes minimal to satisfy the low-bandwidth requirement without sacrificing visual fidelity or environmental atmosphere.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully packaging a fully realized MOBA framework into a responsive web browser prototype that loads instantly.

Proving that the cooperative Critical Ball mechanic completely eliminates slow, tedious lane grinding in favor of fast, high-stakes coordination.

Achieving responsive touch controls and smooth AI pathfinding within a compressed hackathon timeline.

What we learned

WebGL performance tuning relies heavily on early bottleneck identification—minimizing state switches and batching geometry is non-negotiable for mobile web games.

Designing tightly scoped, single-lane objectives creates a much more punchy, satisfying gameplay loop for short session lengths than sprawling multi-lane maps.

What's next for Horizon Heroes

Multiplayer Matchmaking: Integrating WebRTC server-authoritative state synchronization for real-time peer-to-peer or server-backed competitive matches.

Expanded Progression: Adding customizable hero classes, unlockable tactical loadouts, and cosmetic skins.

Spatial Cross-Play: Integrating WebXR capabilities to allow seamless cross-play between desktop browsers, mobile devices, and spatial VR headsets.

Built With

• gemini
• meta-ai