Sharp Blast

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  Ingame Logo

Inspiration

We wanted to create an immersive VR experience that brings back the pure adrenaline rush of classic arcade shooters. The idea was simple: fast-paced target shooting that anyone can pick up but is challenging enough to master, with global competition adding that extra layer of excitement.

What it does

Sharp Blast is a VR arcade shooter for Meta Quest where players blast targets to rack up high scores. Players compete on a global leaderboard, track their ranking in real-time, and challenge friends to beat their best scores. It's all about precision, speed, and climbing to the top.

How we built it

We built Sharp Blast in Unity using the Meta XR SDK for Quest headset integration. The game features a custom scoring system with Unity Gaming Services for cloud-based leaderboards. Our graphist came up with a cool gun and we just had to build a game around it, that's it!

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges with VR performance optimization and ensuring smooth and accurate shooting with passthrough and many randomly generated elements. Managing player state across scenes and synchronizing scores between local storage and cloud services required careful architecture planning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating a fully functional VR arcade experience in a short time with a working global leaderboard system. We have learned about this "jam" pretty late. We made a game that feels satisfying, that's the most important in VR for us.

What we learned

We learned a lot about VR development best practices, async programming in Unity, and cloud service integration. Working with Meta's XR SDK, and implementing a robust leaderboard and that sometimes less is more!

What's next for Sharp Blast

We're planning to add multiple game modes (time attack, survival, precision challenges), new target types with different behaviors, power-ups, a charged shot, and perhaps some kind of rogue like/light mode that incorporates this new stuff as the game session is going so that it becomes more and more challenging! And also a weekly challenge so that the main Arcade Mode (what you have in this build) compels you to come back regularily.

Built With

• unity