Whispering Isle

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  Whispering Isle - "Quiet on good days, trouble on the rest"

Our Mission: Whispering Isle

Inspiration I've always loved cozy games, just like Stardew Valley, and I felt like the controls on Horizons would suit a game like this really well, especially for desktop and mobile. My goal was to build that cozy RPG loop (Explore, Collect, Quest, Fight, Reward) for cross-platform, letting VR, mobile, and desktop players all play together.

The world, Whispering Isle, is a magical island powered by a life crystal. But corruption is growing and seeping its power. The inhabitants have to do various tasks to get essence and feed it back to the life crystal, which powers up the island and keeps the darkness away.

I was so excited to utilize the AI NPC LLM, but it seems I was not able to access that in my region unfortunately.

How We Built It & Future Vision I tried to "fail fast," but I got too ambitious for my first time on the platform. It was my downfall, really. I spent weeks just trying to understand the server/client concepts, how to manage assets, and getting a basic loop stable. I built a server-side spawn manager, a per-player quest tracker, and a weapon system.

But my real vision for this is much bigger. I had so many ideas that I just ran out of time for during the showdown.

My main plan was to make a "Global" healthbar for the life crystal. All players in the world would contribute essence to it. As it hit different stages, it would give everyone buffs, but it would also trigger more enemies and harder challenges to spawn on the island.

I wanted to couple this with my fix for the "5 Minute" play loop - weapons would have randomize rolls for stats, so as part of the loot chances when hunting for essence, this would incentise the user, to give a quick sense of achievement. Login -> Hunt -> RNG Roll Loot -> Deliver Essence -> Sleep.

I also wanted to create an "Evil Island" that players could queue up for. It would be a pure combat zone where you fight waves of monsters for high-end rewards, and all the scores would be tracked on a server leaderboard. I even started thinking about classes. Since FPS projectiles felt a bit difficult to get right, I thought a healer role would be perfect. I was trying to make a healing orb that you could use on other players.

It was a huge learning experience. I had so many more ideas and I'd love to see how far it's possible to take this engine

Challenges & Learnings The greatest challenge was diving into the unknown. It was exciting—drove me to buy my own Meta Quest 3 just to experience the world I was building in VR.

The whole concept of building a game... managing assets, multiplayer, figuring out what runs local vs. managed globally. It was a lot. I was stuck for a while on managing multiple weapons and item collection, just unfamiliar with the avatar and holstering. It wasn't until I played another Horizon game, about a week before the deadline, that it clicked and I knew what to research.

It was great trying to build a game for both VR and Mobile/Desktop; it really makes you think two steps ahead of every choice.

Each day, I found myself wanting to restart or refactor as I learned more about how the Horizon system worked. I went from "okay, this is basic" on day one, to realizing I could build games with different camera perspectives, like top-down or side-scrollers, opening up the possibilities.

But yeah, the development feedback loop felt slow at times, mostly due to the editor. I spent countless hours debugging things that a simple restart ended up fixing.

Built With

• horizon
• meta
• typescript