Loop One: Done - C.A.T (Community Authored Training)

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  C.A.T. Community Authored Training

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  Example of a player built level

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  Another example of a level with winter theme

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  You can record drones and robots and submit when creating your level

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  C.A.T. Editor - Build and share your own levels

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  Select among a lot off options to give you a wide amount of creative possibilities

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  Compete with others in weekly leaderboards

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  Or try competing with yourself to beat your score

Inspiration

I have always loved games that have level editors, and having them in mixed reality is even more fun! I've drawn some inspiration from games like Track Craft, but mostly it's just how I would like to build and play myself.

What it does

C.A.T. (Community Authored Training) is an entirely new game mode in Loop One: Done, that allows players (and me) to easily create scenarios, puzzles, or showcase innovative solutions to other players, directly from the headset. No computer needed.

There are weekly challenges, high-score leaderboards, most-liked levels, and more. And then there is the editor: Allowing players to be creative and design their own levels. They can choose gameplay settings, like which facilities to build and how much money to start with, ore even change the gravity settings. Then they can build out different scenarios or tasks for the player to complete, test the level locally, and then publish it to the server for others to enjoy.

How I built it

It's built in Unity on top of Loop One: Done, a factory automation game in mixed reality. It uses MRUK (for the room API), depth occlusion to ground your factories in reality, hand tracking for easy pickup and play, multimodal input for greater flexibility, and much more. The backend is built in PHP and MariaDB, as those were the tools I've used a lot in my previous career as a front-end developer. I wanted to keep it cheap and efficient. As the multiplayer part is not that demanding, it worked out fine.

Challenges I ran into

Time was the biggest challenge. But I still managed to write the entire backend and the database connections from scratch, connect it with Unity and the new UI, rewrite a lot of core functions in the game to make it work with external files, and make sure the players can play without needing to scan their rooms for quicker play sessions.

It's always hard to make these kinds of core changes in an older project without introducing bugs in the main gameplay. So I did a lot of playtesting to make sure everything was solid.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Writing the entire backend in just 2 days! Then it took 2 weeks to incorporate it into Unity and make all player-facing features. But still!

Also, the new game mode is super fun to play, and it's exciting to see what other players are building! The creativity is endless!

What I learned

Time is a great motivator to try something you didn't think was possible. Dare to do things yourself from scratch, and you will learn a lot.

What's next for Loop One: Done - C.A.T

• Exposing more settings
• Adding more build tools
• Adding deeplinks to easily share a specific level with a friend
• Adding more decorations

Built With

• c#
• mariadb
• mruk
• multimodal-input
• openxr
• php
• unity