Pearl Divers

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  The starting point, your trusty diving boat

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  The underwater cove, full of adventure!

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  More of the cove, corals to be explored!

Inspiration

We were inspired to make this world by our shared fascination for underwater realms and mythology. For us, being able to explore places that are otherwise inaccessible or difficult to experience, along with the exotic nature of such areas, made an underwater map an obvious choice. Furthermore, we realized that with current platform and avatar limitations realization would be a challenge, especially in a development environment we weren’t experienced with, which presented an exciting opportunity.

What it does

In Pearl Divers, you assume the role of someone diving for pearls from their trusty boat. Once in the water, your oxygen runs out, so you better be quick! You must collect as many pearls as possible and make it back to the anchor to get back to the surface, otherwise you lose all your loot! In our concept, multiple players can dive while a captain provides them with oxygen tanks to extend their diving sessions. By working together, players can collect more pearls!

How we built it

We started with concept work which calibrated gameplay and interaction sophistication based on previous competition winners. After deciding on the underwater theme, we drastically simplified gameplay and concept expectations, while in parallel following tutorials by Meta. In addition to the Horizon desktop editor we used Blender, Shapelab and Audacity.

Challenges

Coming from Unity and Blender the obvious challenges were working with a (quite) familiar engine but which has its own quirks and is still in development. In some cases we had to find creative workarounds, such as creating public assets from template projects where it wasn’t possible to use elements natively provided in the engine (in our case these were custom gizmos for player bound UIs). Furthermore, differences between C# and Typescript made for a learning process which was good but challenging.

Accomplishments

We ended up making a script architecture which is very much self made and was incrementally developed according to our needs. Learning event-based programming was new, and each success in broadcasting and receiving events felt good. Furthermore, the world was made using a VR sculpting tool, then retopologized in Blender, where we also set it up with material textures (again a new learning process). Unfortunately, the current state represents how far we got by the deadline, but we will continue the project beyond the submission deadline and look forward to that.

Next Steps

Our next steps include creating and polishing a UI, creating better social roles that invite for collaboration as well as roleplay, improving the game loop with different pearl rarities and ideally also some enemies. We feel we barely scratched the surface of what is possible with the Horizon editor and have already come to appreciate the many built in functions that allow for quick development.

Built With

• audacity
• blender
• shapelab
• typescript
• visual-studio