Table Choppers

Table Choppers Key Art
Chopper and Crates Concept
Table Choppers Gameplay

Inspiration

We loved playing with RC toys when we were younger! However, RC helicopters would always bump into everything in the house, and break stuff. With this Lens, you can fly an RC helicopter around as much as you want with no damage to your home!

What it does

Players place a "helipad" down on their space and then control a chopper to get as many crates as they can within the time limit.

How we built it

From the beginning we knew we wanted to create a simple, objective based game. We originally designed a crane game type mechanism, but realized that a big magnet would be easier to control and understand. We developed a number of early prototypes to figure out the controls and movement mechanics. Our first pass at the control system was designed to function like an actual RC chopper, but after user feedback, we simplified it to make it easier to understand and use.

Challenges we ran into

This game is entirely run off the Lens Studio physics system, so there was a lot of work in getting that working so the game could be run off of it. This meant figuring out how to have magnetic points on the crates that were actually attracted to the magnet. We actually abandoned some crate designs since they did not work well with the physics system.

Another challenge was creating a rope. This actually uses the Lens Studio physics system as well by having 10 linked "connector" components which then have a custom shader (which is a 10 sliced box) that we dynamically stretch the vertices of to match the physics connected rope. It ended up working really well!

Additionally, we needed to make it easy for players to be able to get crates, so we added drop shadows to the magnet, base, and chopper that expand closer to surfaces. Additionally, we have a marker so the player can see the magnet. We also reinforce this through having the chopper magnet and the crates glow when the chopper is within range of them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of how polished this Lens turned out, definitely one of our finest. Getting the entire game to be physics driven was also a big accomplishment!

What we learned

How to use the physics system
UX around player control of RC vehicles in a Lens
Polish needed to really have players see important information around how to play