Sweet Royale

Sweet Royale is a fast-paced MR strategy game where you command candy troops with your hands, mixing real-world passthrough and playful, competitive action.

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Inspiration

We wanted to capture the feeling of commanding tiny armies right in front of you, like moving figurines on a living tabletop. Sweet Royale started from a simple idea: what if a classic RTS could be played entirely with your hands, in mixed reality, as if you were a giant general overlooking a candy-sized battlefield?

The gameplay style of Mushroom Wars was the perfect foundation for this vision. Its fast-paced, tower-based control scheme fits naturally with hand tracking, allowing quick, intuitive gestures without the need for pinpoint accuracy or physical controllers. By reimagining that concept in a playful candy universe, we turned intense tactical combat into something lighthearted, colorful, and deliciously chaotic.

Our goal wasn’t only to make something cute, we wanted to show how MR can make strategy tangible. Seeing your battlefield appear on your desk and reaching out to lead your cookie troops into battle is a kind of magic that only mixed reality can offer.

How we built it

Sweet Royale was built in Unity over the course of two months by a small team at Odders Studio. We used the Meta XR SDK to fully integrate hand tracking, passthrough, and spatial features into the experience.

From the start, we focused on achieving a solid performance on Quest 3 and 3S, even with dozens of troops moving simultaneously. The game features a custom gesture recognition layer optimized for quick tap commands.

Visually, we put a lot of effort into polish, from candy-like shaders and squishy animations to vibrant VFX that make the battlefield feel alive and tactile. The current version is a vertical slice designed to showcase gameplay, technical performance, and visual identity in MR.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was scale. We needed the battlefield to feel comfortably reachable without forcing players to stretch their arms, while keeping the troops large enough to be readable and expressive. Balancing that physical play area with visual clarity took a lot of iteration.

We also had to design controls under strict constraints, with hand tracking, less is more. Every extra gesture increases the chance of user fatigue or tracking errors, so we embraced design by subtraction, reducing inputs to the essentials.

What we learned

We learned that MR design requires restraint and precision. Simplicity in interaction can lead to greater immersion, and optimizing for comfort is just as important as optimizing for performance. We also deepened our understanding of hand tracking responsiveness and how visual feedback can guide players naturally without heavy UI.

What’s next

Sweet Royale is just the beginning. Our next steps include:

  • Multiplayer battles.
  • New factions with unique stats and visual identities.
  • Captains with special active abilities.
  • A single-player campaign that expands the candy war lore.

Our long-term goal is to publish the full game on the Meta Horizon Store as the first accessible and delightful mixed-reality RTS, where strategy quite literally unfolds on your table.

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