Inspiration
Halloween night as a kid: running from house to house, knocking on doors, racing your friends to fill the bag before the night ends. We wanted to bring that rush into mixed reality, with a hand-drawn, Tim Burton–inspired look — crooked houses, long shadows, characters that look like they came out of a sketchbook.
What it does
Trick or Treat Rush is a fast trick-or-treating game for Meta Quest 3 / 3S, played entirely with your hands.
- On your table (mixed reality): a haunted miniature village appears on your real table through passthrough. Your own Meta Avatar runs through the streets, knocks on doors, collects candy and escapes the monsters. Point and pinch to move, knock, use your power or shout Boo!.
- First person (VR): switch to full scale and see the village through your avatar's eyes. Point at the ground, pinch, and you teleport there; pinch at a door to knock.
- 8 nights, 8 neighborhoods: Pumpkin Lane, Transylvania, Model Town, French Quarter, North Pole, New York, Buenos Aires and Cyberpunk Berlin. Each night lasts 1:30, has three stars to earn and teaches a new skill.
- Hand-drawn locals: Dracula, the scarecrow, the mime, Santa and more — drawn on paper first, then rebuilt in 3D to match the drawings.
- Your avatar, your costume: every player plays as their own Meta Avatar (or a random one if they don't have one), dressed in Halloween costumes.
- Leaderboard with friends: your best candy from each night adds up to a score you can compare with friends.
How we built it
- Unity 6 with the Meta XR Core SDK (passthrough, hand tracking), Meta Avatars SDK and Meta Platform SDK (users, leaderboards).
- The game rules started as our web game. We ported them to pure C# line by line and verified them against the web version event by event, so both play the same match.
- The village, props and textures are glTF models loaded with glTFast; the hand-drawn characters are built procedurally in code so they keep the ink-and-paper style.
- Fully hands-first: a custom pinch-and-point ray with smoothing, poke-to-press menus and self-aim (point at yourself to use your power).
Challenges we ran into
- Making hands feel precise: the pinch ray jittered at the moment fingers closed, so a pinch landed somewhere else. We freeze the ray only during the closing instant and added a forgiving "door magnet" so a pinch near a door knocks instead of walking away.
- Two scales, one game: the same village has to read well as a tabletop miniature and at life size around you.
- Audio on resume: the headset could resume the app with audio muted; we had to reset the audio output on focus.
- Costumes on avatars: hats and masks inherited bone rotations and came out sideways until we re-aligned every piece.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- A full campaign of 8 distinct neighborhoods, each with its own lighting, skyline and locals.
- Playable from start to finish with hands only — no controllers needed.
- Characters that actually look like the original drawings.
What we learned
How much small details matter in hand interaction: a few milliseconds of ray stability or a slightly bigger target changes the whole feel. We also learned the Meta Horizon pipeline end to end — avatars, platform features, release channels and store assets.
What's next for Trick or Treat
- Live multiplayer races with friends in the same village.
- More hand-drawn characters for every neighborhood.
- A daily challenge night with a shared leaderboard.
