Season Dash

tap to jump
swipe to change lanes
avoid incoming obstacles!
snow adventure
play with friends
compete on the leaderboard!

Inspiration

Drawing inspiration from games like Subway Surf, I wanted to bring my own vision of an endless runner to Meta Horizon Worlds. My goal was to create one that transitions through unique seasons, setting players against moving firetrucks, vans, and giant snowballs. I designed this as a multiplayer experience to create a new holiday tradition: racing against my niece and nephews.

The Summer Route:

Inspired by the scenic drive on Highway 101 from Marin to San Francisco, capturing that moment you exit the Robin Williams Tunnel to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Winter Route:

Inspired by the beautiful winter trails of Lake Tahoe. This route features pine trees, ski lifts, and cabins to evoke memories of ski trips, with festive elements like Christmas trees and tumbling snowballs to add a sense of whimsical adventure.

What it does

Grab your friends and hit the road in Season Dash! Swipe to dodge, tap to jump, and race side-by-side to see who can handle incoming obstacles, with increasing speed, and claim the top score!

How I built it

Obstacle design patterns

Season Dash features over 20+ handcrafted obstacle and coin layouts. While the game utilizes procedural generation to create an unique experience for every run, I moved away from pure randomness to ensure aesthetic cohesion and playability. Extensive iteration was required to guarantee that every generated path is navigable while becoming progressively more challenging.

Mobile performance

Rather than constantly destroying and instantiating objects, the game "recycles" obstacles the player has already passed, moving them ahead to the future track, improving performance on mobile devices.

Challenges we ran into / What I learned

I ran into many race condition bugs between server and local pre-start code. I had to carefully debug the sequence of events between the game managers and local controllers.

As this was my first project using the Meta Horizon Editor, I gained experience with the V2 APIs—specifically the network and local event systems, collision detection, the new Gesture API, Custom UI, and the Local Camera.

The official tutorials and example projects were extremely helpful in teaching me the fundamentals of the editor and how to structure the project and game managers.

Accomplishments

I am proud that I was able to build an exciting multiplayer endless runner game within a month with no prior experience and that I can play this game with my family this holiday season!

Future Plans

Looking ahead, I plan to complete the seasonal cycle by introducing Autumn and Spring routes. The Autumn route will draw inspiration from the traditional architecture of Kyoto, Japan, featuring Japanese castles and cherry blossoms, while the Spring route will transport players to the Old West, dodging tumbleweeds and oncoming steam trains.

I want to deepen the multiplayer experience by adding cooperative mechanics, where players must work together to clear heavy obstacles or coordinate their movements to access coins that are unreachable alone.