Star Crawler

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project is a love for simple dungeon crawlers, and that weird 70's and 80's mash-up of sci fi and fantasy. If you love the movie Krull, hopefully you'll feel a similar vibe playing our game.

What it does

It's just a demo, so we feel like it barely scratches the surface at this point, but basically you and a couple of friends can navigate a dungeon, kill baddies, and grab the MacGuffin at the end. Extremely basic, but still quite fun to play!

How we built it

We used the Horizon Worlds editor, Maya for modeling, and Substance Painter for textures. I'd also like to give a shout out to SonusNovum from whom we sourced the awesome music!

Challenges we ran into

It's always a bit challenging learning new tools under tight deadlines, and The Horizon Worlds editor is no exception. However, once we got the hang of things we found a lot to like about the tools and are eager to see how they develop. Additionally, we ran into significant challenges attempting to add support for multiplayer near the end of development, which in all honesty was completely on us. The project started as a simple single payer dungeon crawl demo, something that seemed easy and doable in the time allotted. In the last weeks of development I had the kooky idea to bump the max player count to 4, and play a session with my kids. It was great fun and opened my eyes to the real potential of a living, breathing, always on world. The trouble of course was that from the earliest conception our project was designed to be single player, and every decision along the way supported that. Everything from the goal of the level to the enemy spawns were designed to be linear, and tweaking them to work in a multiplayer, always on paradigm was an exercise in fitting a square peg to a round hole. In the end we arrived at something that works, for the most part, but suffers from the lack of understanding of the platform. Going forward we plan to take this lesson to heart and build more in harmony with the Horizon vision.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're pretty proud of what two people were able to accomplish in a month's worth of spare time! I think we created something that truly hints at the promise of our vision, and is pretty fun to boot.

What we learned

Chiefly how to work in the Horizon Worlds editor, and to a lesser extent some of the fundamentals of Dungeon Crawler design. We're two developers with decades of experience between us, but surprisingly enough neither of us have ever worked on a dungeon crawler, so there was definitely a bit of a learning curve! And as stated previously, we learned some hard lessons in designing for the Horizon platform, and hope to apply those lessons going forward.

What's next for Star Crawler

We would love to continue adding features and content to Star Crawler. Everything from more robust support for multiplayer, a more fleshed out story, way more dungeons, loot, and MacGuffins are on our short list. At this point it's simply a matter of community interest and developer time.

Built With

• horizons
• maya
• meta
• substance