B-KPR

A pet care genre-game based around looking after a community of droid bee's (B's) and their Hive. Find Nectar Flowers to power the Hive, recruit new B-Buddies and defend the Hive against invaders.

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Inspiration

B-KPR is inspired by teamwork and collaboration. We wanted to create a pet care sim that was not just about caring for an individual, but caring for an entire community with the community playing it’s part in that care also, assisting the player with tasks for the benefit of the entire Hive.

Stylistically we were inspired by a Mecha Sci-fi vibe, Brutalist architecture, bee hives, hexagons, droids and the film Chappie. The visual connection to hexagons is a thread that runs throughout, from the Hive architecture and sky texture, through to the character design and UI. We also designed the architecture of the Hive to not only be impressive in appearance, but also key to core game functionality. This is evident in how the 60 degree angles between the defence windows divide the landscape into six zones and how the staircase wraps around the central core, allowing players to reach each empty power cell as they ascend.

What it does

The nature of the gameplay is all about time management. The player should manage their time effectively to collect power for the Hive and find other B’s to join the community, but ensure they are back in time to defend the Hive from the Invaders seeking to steal the Hive’s Nectar. This becomes much more manageable when playing with friends, as tasks can be divided, encouraging teamwork and communication rather than competition.

We wanted the gameplay to be a mix of high octane action, quest based discovery and progressive achievements. We did this by effectively creating three interlinked mini-games; a lock and key mechanic for collecting Nectar cells and filling the power core, a progressive achievement based scavenger hunt for finding new B’s to join the hive, and a first person arcade style shooter/tower defence against the invading wasps and hornets.

How we built it

All the core architectural, character, vehicle and UI was designed, built, modelled, and textured from scratch, entirely by human hands and no AI input. We leveraged AI to assist with wider environment generation, sounds and props as well as utilising and modifying royalty free publicly available assets.

The programming and code was done in conjunction with the Meta AI assistance as well as other external AI models for sense checking

Challenges we ran into

We found it challenging to manage multiple devs working simultaneously in a world, specifically when interacting with the AI assistant. It seemed to get confused easily and often seemed to mix up instructions from multiple team members. We overcame this issue by splitting dev tasks into manageable chunks and working on them in separate individual worlds, before saving the output as assets and importing them into the main world, then building proprietary scripts to knit all the functionality together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the overall scale, design and aesthetic of our world, as well as the scripted interactions which combine 3 mini-games into one progressive quest.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Horizon worlds code block events, the different API's available for mobile experiences including the camera API, local and server scripts, custom UI and player management. We have an active bugs doc here which details future improvements to our world: bugs doc

What's next for B-KPR

Our plan is to continue to improve the world performance, expand the functionality to include UGC and merchandise unlocked by game achievements, add a competitive mode where there are multiple Hives for teams of players to compete with each other for world resources, and expand the B-KPR universe with doors to other worlds featuring different species of colonies.

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