Slasher

Cedar Hollow
Slashers
Tutorial
Slasher logo

Inspiration

The world was inspired by 70-90's slasher films. Scream and Halloween were the two biggest sources of inspiration, but Friday the 13th and Drive-Thru gave us the main ideas for the setting, art direction and environment of the world. The games Dead by Daylight and Among Us gave us the ideas for the gameplay loop.

A conversation at Meta Connect with a fellow creator about past experiences gave us the vision to build a fast-paced social game with minimum downtime and maximum silliness potential.

What it is about

Slasher is a game that takes place in a fictional town by the name of Cedar Hollow, located somewhere in the Midwestern US. Players are given a speed boost, and are told to scatter and hide around the map. One of these players then gets selected as the "Slasher", tasked with eliminating all other players. The remaining survivors need to work together in order to stay alive, using equipment scavenged from the map. After a certain time, the game loops, new hiding spots are found and a new Slasher is selected.

How we built it

As the hackathon was announced, we committed to sit in a voice call every night and work on the world together. We started by building out the core gameplay hook with a basic block-out level. We iteratively refined both the gameplay and structure of the map until it was fun to play and felt right, then started set dressing and sound designing.

We identified that we could build things of good quality a lot faster if we used the built-in GenAI toolset and then manually processed it. For example, we began generating audio samples which we then imported into FL Studio, layered and mixed manually. Two excellent examples of this are the slasher and survivor selection sounds.

Challenges we ran into

As we began working on our world, we were both freshly introduced to Horizon Worlds through the Worlds Creator Academy. We had to allocate a fair bit of time to figuring out what our development pipeline should look like. For example, we found out that light only affected meshes at their vertices, which led us to create a high-poly block kit in a 3D modelling program, which we then imported into the engine to build the map.

Additionally, we found it challenging to sync game state as players joined and left, and working around this required spawning local player controllers which then communicated two-ways with the server when ready.

Lastly, we had to think about the players who'd end up visiting the world. Designing an experience for many concurrent players as a duo is a hard task, so we conducted numerous play tests with friends. Through a combination of those and the feedback festival, we found out that there were plenty of balancing levers to pull in regards to player movement, "juiciness" and visual contrast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The level looks very pretty, and the game loop is fun. We're proud of the skills we've built around working in Horizon, an engine we haven't previously used. It was also a great deal of fun playing it with other people for the first time, and seeing their reactions.

What's next for Slasher

We've built out a currency system and a leaderboard system, awarding you in-game money as you perform certain high-engagement actions. In the near future we plan on launching a shop where you can spend this in-game money (with a side option of skipping using IWPs) to purchase new slasher classes, as well as trails.

There is a secret sixth slasher class which we plan on unveiling during an in-game event, requiring players to complete a challenge to obtain it.

Finally, we want to add random mutators, multiple concurrent slashers as a session grows, and more maps.