Pop & Drop

Inspiration

We are inspired by fun party games where the engagement comes from the emergent narrative of the people you play it with. Games like Spin The Bottle bring out the best and worst in us and when we are able to tap into that kind of human emotion, we think games can be transcendent. That is what we were inspired by with Pop & Drop.

What it does

The game is pretty simple but just have a few twists and turns. We want to make it simple to play with friends and limited requirement to explain the rules. Refencing the carnival games of old where you can dunk a person in a tub of water, we invite players to pop other players balloons and send them splashing into the water and the waiting jaws of a killer shark. There are equal parts absurdity and challenge this game.

The meta game of allowing you to customise balloons and FX helps to add to the longevity.

How we built it

We build this game working with a team of both experienced and inexperienced developers (from the perspective of working with Horizon Worlds). Many of the team had worked together before making VR games but not in Horizon Worlds. The art process for this was done largely in traditional tools like Maya and Blender. We then input these into the game. The coding was all in typescript, again working with someone who has had a lot of experience coding Rec Room and VR Chat but not Horizon Worlds. We have the benefit of working with a very experience project manager who was able to guide us through the project and be mindful of the platforms potential and restrictions.

Challenges we ran into

We have several challenges during the development.

Firstly, we need to simplify the game. The design for the game included a card system to help bring depth to the experience. This worked well on paper but it was immediately apparent that this was going to be too complex and challenge for a game platform where we wanted users to be able to pick up the game quickly. We hence removed these elements and while we may bring it back in the future, we think it works just fine without this extra game design layer.

Secondly, we had challenges with the play time and initial games were going on for longer than our target time of less than 5 mins. We made some tweaks to the way the wheel spins (auto spins, speed of spin) and also some design tweaks to the wedges to ensure a game could resolve pretty quickly.

One of the final challenges we encountered was to do with the seated nature of the game and our desire to have NPCs join the game with you if you are playing solo OR with less than 4 players. We first included the NPCs and they were fine but when we needed them to sit, we had several issues keeping them in the spot and posing them correctly. Rather than going back to a standing model, we decided to have a set of stand in NPCs be proxies for the actual NPCs (who are still there but off the play space). The new NPCs are fun sea creatures that fit the theme and have a little more personality that the generic NPCs when playing. We are happy with this result and look forward to adding more Sea Creatures in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really happy with how the world looks and feels. The environment design is (we think) one of the best in Horizon Worlds and have a high level of detail while still being performant across platforms.

We are also really proud of the simple IWP implementation and allowing players to purchase balloons and pop FX.

What we learned

We learned that keeping things simple is key and tapping into core social desires of players will help us create a fun experience. We also learned that discovery is hard and we are actively talking to other world creators to see if we can create reciprocal portals to each others worlds.

What's next for Pop & Drop

We want to keep developing the meta game. After we launched, we introduced Daily Challenges that promote engagement on a daily basis and reset each day. We are looking at Achievements that can reward players for ongoing play. These achievements have been designed and will offer game multipliers for earning more coins. We also have plans to have monthly events with prizes to promote engagement. In addition to design and events, we also would like to look at some extra animation work for our NPCs and implementing a more sophisticated AI model for them.