Moles

The Happy Machine

NOTE: I cloned my submission world and will continue development within the world titled "Moles - Beta". I was asked to provide that link for promotional purposes, however it will not be public for several days while I update some things: https://horizon.meta.com/world/680010281852554

Inspiration

I have this possibly-misguided belief that you can be successful with anything so long as you try relentlessly and execute. So I decided my first idea was, indeed, an idea, and went with it. Basically the idea is that you hit moles with a big hammer. Wow, right!?

At it's core, Moles is a Whack-a-Mole-like that shouldn't be too unfamiliar to players. It's based on the idea that we humans have two, conflicting primal urges when it comes to small furry things:

Love them and nurture them
Eek, smash them!

Moles will try to explore both sides of that humanity.

My artistic inspiration is my favorite vidya of all time, Super Mario RPG. It's zany, colorful, and it has moles who operate mine carts. I tried to make Moles zany and colorful too, but I'm an engineer first and a very poor artist, so you get what you get.

What it does

Think that's mostly covered by now. It gives you a hammer (usually) and lets you smash some moles. There are soda powerups that, when consumed, mutate the player in all sorts of whacky ways.

How we built it

With the desktop editor... duh! And lots and lots of caffeine and late nights filled with frustration and laughter.

Challenges we ran into

I'm a one guy dev team. Though, I have been getting help testing and such from some friends I've made along the way!
My wife and I have 2 babies under 2 years old.
Brand new to HW and VR / mobile game dev generally

Accomplishments that we're proud of

You can smash moles
The hammers are very big
I really wanted my mole characters to be animated in Blender so I made a system that allows me to do that
I was very proud of the code until about a week ago when I just started letting AI slop nonsense into it because I was pressed for time. I cannot wait to get back in there when not under pressure and human-ify things.

What we learned

The HW API is honestly a delight -- it's been so ridiculously easy to pick up. Please give your API designer a raise. Really though, it's been a month of firehose learning, I couldn't possibly begin to summarize it.

What's next for Moles

Bug fixes. The small moles are somewhat bugged right now due to trying to maximize them for VR. I think the fix is mostly just moving their state machine to the server and only transferring their corporeal elements to clients when absolutely necessary. But with a day left to submit, did I fix bugs? No, I jammed more features in because that's how I roll.
"Soldier" Moles which will provide needed antagonism against the players and bolster the Queen's defenses.
A sister world called Mole Baby Havers (or perhaps Mole Havers Club Portal, I really like the acronym MHCP for some reason). In this world you'll get to hear the Moles tell their side of the story, play minigames, dress up your mole baby, etc. It will be exclusive to players who are awarded a baby mole in Moles.
Finish adding the prizes to the Happy Machine, including permanent items, super-rare collectables (like the baby mole), etc.