Startup Island

Startup Island Welcome Screen

Inspiration

Every great game has an underlying narrative, so the plan was to make a tycoon game based off real-life experience, combining actual lived moments with stereotypical Silicon Valley perception to build the ultimate goal of getting a company to funding. In startup land, cash is your health bar. Grind at mining cryptocurrency to gain more potential capital, and be sure to touch grass so you don't lose market fit. Network with other founders, learn from mentors, hear stories from the trenches, and build slides to ultimately deliver a pitch deck and try to get funded. Run out of money? No problem, no you're a 2nd-time, 3rd-time, or 4th-time founder, which gives investors even more confidence for your next run-through. The world is also filled with "experienced" founders, mentors, and VCs to hear stories and get advice from that can entertain and answer questions, allowing this to be a fun simulation / educational journey of the startup dream.

What it does

Explore a sprawling island and try to avoid running out of cash as you work to build your reputation and market fit while learning from your peer and mentor network. Enhancing tycoon simulation with gem collection gameplay and NPC networking, the best part of startup life is that even when you lose, you gain experience to keep going and play again, making the game not only infinitely playable with bite-sized gameplay, but endlessly satisfying as you get to live the Silicon Valley dream without the actual risks involved and play alongside real (friends to play with) as well as artificial founders.

How it was built

Studying all of the templates, pulling what was needed from each, and incorporating the relevant bits one by one along with painstaking migration and integration into a cohesive formed world. The goal was to take all of the tools given and see how far this could be taken in a matter of weeks, proving out the potential of all of the educational and assisted materials across YouTube videos, documentation, template worlds, Tutorial Worlds, and GenAI provided to the creator community, when attached to a personal story and universal narrative.

Challenges encountered

There are so many systems in play here, from player persistent variables, store mechanics, server/client player management, NPC management, world and environment creation, custom UI in overlay and spatial form, and more all running together simultaneously. Understanding the depths of how all of these systems interplay with each other was the biggest learning curve, including server-client communication and camera control.

Accomplishments to be proud of

The end product looks, feels, and sounds better than any other game that was built in this amount of time, and elicits laughter and joy from everyone who's tested it. Of special note are the music system, allowing each interactive character to have their own theme music play when interacting with them, along with the interactivity of the player characters. There was no known way to "interact" directly with NPCs, so this system uses a combination of invisible custom UI, local and networked events, and camera control to create the way of directly interfacing with NPCs and having an overlaid UI to interact with them for an easy mobile command system.

What was learned

The depth of Horizon Worlds. The avatar NPC conversations and capabilities really add a lot of life and on their own have significant potential, in addition to being couched in a series of other accelerant tools. The framework of this competition really pushed me to look into Horizon Worlds as a serious development tool and I'm keen to see where it keeps going.

What's next for Startup Island

We would love to keep going and add more features that didn't make it in: hiring employees and having them datamine, research, and market passively to build market fit and reputation. Have the ability to join forces with other players and make group startups, and have actual in-game events where people can learn more about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship without having to actually take the risk themselves. Also: This is secretly Chapter 1: Road to Funding, and ends with the startup getting funded like a board game similar to "The Game of Life". It was built with the concept of Chapter 2: Road to Launch, and Chapter 3: Road to Exit in mind, and given a certain level of success, could carry player data across the chapters as a world trilogy.