View our Design Doc Here: Mars Homecoming Design Doc
Inspiration
We are inspired by minimalist city building and management games as well as relaxing zen experiences, and we want to recreate these feelings in Mixed Reality, so that the players could enjoy the sense of accomplishment from building in a hybrid world.
What it does
Mars Homecoming is a minimalist mixed-reality city-building game. You play as the commander developing a Mars settlement, gathering resource, and building a legacy within the comfort of your own living room.
How we built it
We build our game in Unity with XR frameworks including Unity XR Toolkit, OpenXR, and Oculus Integration. We build a procedural generation algorithm to create unique landscape to increase replayability and sense of exploration, and we also implemented a distance based scoring system to allow a diverse and vibrant building experience guided by intuitive scoring scheme.
Challenges we ran into
Developing for Mixed Reality is definitely a rewarding journey. We spent plenty time setting up the developing environment and framework for both development and testing. The unique sense of space in Mixed Reality also brought us challenges in designing metrics for the level, and we repeatedly play tested and iterated in order to create an intuitive and comfortable playing experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We achieve our design goal of creating a relaxing city building simulation. The Mixed Reality passthrough worked out extremely well with the targeted sense of accomplishment we aimed to achieve. In our final version, play testers commonly agree that they could effortlessly create an interesting space while enjoying making tiny strategic decisions along the way to exercise their creativity.
What we learned
One valuable lesson is the significance of play testing. We pivoted many times, especially surrounding play space and building mechanics, from the feedbacks we received from the players. Due to the special platform that carries this game, players would react differently and sometimes drastically if there are details we are missing or design elements that we are not adapting well.
What's next for Mars Homecoming
We aim to further push the boundary of the mixed reality experience. In the next step, we aim to completely abandon the use of controller and have the players use their hand to grab the buildings, rotate them as they wish, and the place them. We want to take use of the unique hand gesture recognition from Pico integration, to create a cutting edge experience that are empowered by this special platform.
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