Legends of the Horizon Sea

Pirates rule the skies! Command a flying ship, uncover lost civilizations, and seek hidden treasures. Find magic wands and use portals. Will fortune favor you or send storms crashing down?

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Project Story

1. Inspiration

What inspired you to create this world? What other worlds or media influenced your creative direction?

I took a course in college about world civilizations and fell in love with ancient architecture, especially Mayan, Egyptian, and Olmec. I found inspiration from online resources about architectural design for Mayan and Egyptian ruins to create this world. In addition, I was influenced by the movie Stargate to incorporate portals for teleportation.

2. How We Built It

What were the key tools and processes you used to create the world? If this is a team world, who contributed and how did they contribute?

The key tools used to create the models for the pirate ship and the pyramid were Autodesk Fusion and Unity (to extract textures), before uploading everything into HWDE (Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor).
ChatGPT was used to create our tarot cards, and the Pirate Talk Translator was used to produce our pirate dialog. Most of our world was built using GenAI tools.

This was a team world:

  • Sampson contributed to modeling, audio, programming, and shared in the world-building process.
  • Lissette worked on asset creation using GenAI and also contributed to world-building.

3. Challenges

What were the biggest difficulties you encountered, and how did you overcome or work around them?

  • HWDE was entirely new to both Sampson and Lissette. The biggest challenge was learning to adapt to using the gizmos and understanding the API for coding. Fortunately, Sampson's decade of Unity experience helped us overcome some of these learning hurdles.
  • An unexpected challenge was that our balloon target practice mini-game, which was simple for Web, turned out to be nearly impossible for mobile users. To address this, we decreased the custom gravity on the Y-axis to make the balloons float up at a slower rate, giving mobile users more time to aim and shoot.

4. Accomplishments

Which parts of your world, or your building process, are you most proud of?

  • Sampson: I am most proud of the process I used to create the pirate ship and the tunnel leading to an underground tomb in our Ancient Egypt Civilization.
  • Lissette: I am proud of the world-building that I have contributed to the Mayan and Ancient Egyptian Civilization.

5. Next Steps

How are you going to keep improving the world? What would you like to add if you have more time?

We plan to expand the world with additional side-quests and a tarot card game with a pirate theme. We’re also considering evolving our miniature civilizations into larger stand-alone worlds and continuing to improve our code to enhance performance.

If there had been more time, we would have added a tarot card game to the pirate ship portion of the world for the initial submission, along with a UI two-option feature that would dynamically alter the player's experience and story.

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