MECHA

Cover Art
Your mecha, reminiscent of Evangelion
Customize your mecha
High speed aerial combat
Warp time using the Chronos Rifle

Inspiration

MECHA was inspired by two parts:

Our love for mecha anime like Evangelion, Gundam Wing, G Gundam, etc. growing up in the 90's and 2000's. We used to daydream about what it would be like to pilot one of these mechs.
Our longstanding motivation to help people live healthier lives. Nathan and I worked together on Jive Health, where we built a game to help kids eat healthier, and won 1st place in the Partnership for a Healthier America End Childhood Obesity Innovation Challenge sponsored by Michelle Obama (https://www.inc.com/coolest-college-start-ups-2013/nicole-marie-richardson/jivehealth-dennis-ai.html).

Long story short, we saw an opportunity to combine both in MECHA, a way to fulfill that dream of what it's like to pilot a high speed aerial mecha, and get people to be active while having fun.

What it does

MECHA is a first person arena shooter game where you pilot a high speed flying mech and fight against other pilots to rise up in the Mecha League. It also has full career mode with sponsors, tournaments, upgrades, and rival pilots.

The foundation of MECHA is the lean movement system that we developed in which a player can fly their mech in any direction by leaning their body in that same direction. This is natural and intuitive and helps to avoid motion sickness. As you can imagine, it's a very active game where you can work up a sweat while having loads of fun.

How we built it

MECHA was built in Unity using the XR Interaction Toolkit, Open XR, Meta SDKs, and ML-Agents (for the enemy AI).

Challenges we ran into, accomplishments that we're proud of, and what we learned

The biggest challenges were probably designing the lean movement system, architecting and training the AI in 6 different game modes, and optimizing performance so we could render a 12-mecha match (with AI all running on device) with high fidelity at 90 fps.

This last part was especially challenging, as we realized the character system that we were using was extremely CPU-intensive and wouldn't scale past 8 mechas, so we had to rewrite the entire character system from scratch to squeeze out every last bit of performance.

What's next for MECHA

We have just submitted to the Meta Horizon Store! Next, we are planning on building out a multiplayer mode where people can play with their friends and deeply customize their mechas both cosmetically and functionally.