Mysterious Planet

Inspiration

This world was inspired by the atmosphere and feel of games like Myst, where the player gets to explore exotic worlds that create intrigue and mystery.

What it does

The purpose of this world is to be as newbie friendly as possible, it serves as a great onboarding experience for totally new players such as those joining only through mobile. Each section of the world provides its own unique challenge, and players are reset to checkpoints for that specific section of the world so that friends, or those that just met, can stay together and enjoy the world at their own pace without losing tracking of eachother.

How we built it

The world is built using public assets only (aside from a single audio asset and material!). The idea here was to showcase the world building potential and environmental story telling possibilities for those that just want to use public assets and jump straight into creating a space for others to share and enjoy.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenges were keeping the world visually appealing while not adding an unnecessary amount of assets that would impact load times and performance. I deliberately wanted to keep the world entirely to the modality of joystick naviation and jump, sticking with the defaults, so adding interesting mechanics (such as invisible platform memorization, portal navigation etc) that were built entirely on the move and jump mechanic was a fun challenge.

Another signifcant challenge was optimising the difficult between mobile, desktop and VR. Generally speaking mobile was the most difficult input method to control therefore it became the baseline, but it was important to ensure that other platforms were not made too easy. I spent quite a bit of time testing all 3 platforms in rotation for each section and tweaking each to find a sweetspot between all 3. I actually found this process became quite intuitive over time and I believe it would be possible to create general guidelines and guides as to what tolerances the sweetspot overlap between input methods exists.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm quite proud of the accessiblity of this world and the variation in mood/atmosphere.

What we learned

I learned a good deal about entity relationships within the scripting of Horizon desktop editor, from which I'm excited to dive into further and build out more intricate systems.

What's next for Mysterious Planet

Currently mysterious planet has 4 distinct areas, I would like to expand this, along with adding quests and leaderboards (time spent, fastest traversal). Then I'd like to create sister planets that users travel to, ideally keeping an underlying theme implying a specific group are the inhabitants of these various worlds and have been travelling for some time.