Iron Moon

Don't get overwhelmed
Iron Moon
Spend crystals to build the most powerful tanks
Harvest crystals to level up your base
Team up with other players to control the moon!
Climb the leaderboards!

Inspiration

When I saw the title "Mobile Innovation", I knew I wanted to do something unlike anything else I've seen on Horizon Worlds. Then seeing the category for one-click-movement, I instantly thought of RTS games, such as the Red Alert series. Therefore, I present to you "Iron Moon", a spiritual successor to Red Alert 3, set on the moon after Tim Curry's infamous escape from capitalism!

What it does

The game features a small RTS style moon base, where you can build "Harvesters" and a range of tanks.

Players can control one or many units at a time, and it is their job to harvest the crystal ore that spawns around the map.

Bringing ore back to the base gives the player resources to build more vehicles, but also levels up the base: generating more passive resources, but also attracting more enemies to defend the ore.

Your Horizon Worlds avatar can also be controlled as one of your units, and repairs any vehicles that they are near to, making them a valuable asset!

Challenges we ran into

The default NavMesh behaviour felt strange when using the quantised directional sprites for the vehicles, therefore I separate out the vehicles into an invisible NavMesh agent, and a visible sprite which was constrained to follow the agent, but only while moving in a cardinal or intercardinal direction.

Unfortunately the new MoveTo function for the player does not seem to respect the NavMesh, and I therefore had to keep the obstructions on the map a bit simpler than I would have otherwise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Growing up, I absolutely LOVED the Westwood RTS games, so I've thoroughly enjoyed creating this homage to them. I also feel RTS is an underserved genre nowadays, especially on mobile, and the default multiplayer/drop in-out nature of horizon worlds actually turned out to make a very suitable environment to try a slightly different take on the old classics!

What's next for Iron Moon

The obvious thing missing right now is building your own base!

I'd like to start with simple defensives, like turrets and walls, however full on factory and resource buildings would be the natural expansion to this experience.