ForwardXP had a contract with Meta to create four minigames for Horizon Worlds as part of their World Hop game mode, where players would group up and play several games in a row and accumulate points across them. The catch? All the games had to be made *in Horizon Worlds*. It was supposed to showcase the power of their tools, but to be honest, it wasn't ready for that.
They built their own game engine on top of Unity that included its own scripting language, reminiscent of Scratch. But to code, you had to literally drag and drop every single line of code by physically moving your hand. Imagine doing that for 8 hours a day! There were also numerous bugs and game-breaking glitches, I have nearly an endless supply of horror stories from working on this project.
And yet... this was the first time I was professionally making my own games, and you know what? I loved it. There's truly nothing like the feeling of watching somebody enjoy your work. I had a surprising amount of creative control for just being a junior engineer, and I'm very thankful to our senior designer Jon Skinner for trusting me with that freedom. While Horizon was a nightmare to work in, it helped me realize that I'm meant to create games.
Malware Mayhem
This was the first pitch from our studio that was accepted by Meta, and ultimately was the first minigame we finished. It's basically cyberspace whack-a-mole with computer bugs. It was originally created by our senior designer, but I took over implementation not long after it was approved.
Originally the bugs just spawned from one edge of a square playspace and moved to a different edge, but it didn't feel very engaging. I decided to rebuild the system to spawn "waves" of different bug types and designed a node-based pathing system for the bugs. It was quite a pain in Horizon, but I think it paid off in the end.
It's basic by typical game standards, but believe me, getting this working in Horizon was a miracle!
Ocean Cleanup
After I finished Malware Mayhem, I started prototyping other gameplay mechanics that could potentially become our next game. I enjoyed having total freedom to come up with my own ideas. My best one was a helmet that would guide a missile to wherever you were looking. I had several ideas for the direction it could take, but I eventually settled on one with a positive message: guiding little robots through the ocean to clean up trash.
Forcing the players to put on a helmet got vetoed by Meta, so I settled for using little laser pointers instead. It went through a few different iterations, including a failed one where players had to bring trash back to one of their boats on the surface. It was boring to go back and forth so much, so I redesigned it to where players simply compete for trash directly in the space in front of them. Sometimes simpler is better!
Robo Arms
This was originally created by a different coworker and was one of the first pitches Meta accepted, but his game world started to get more and more corrupted over time (the joys of Horizon Worlds). He went on vacation for a few weeks and I was asked to take over his work. I ended up rebuilding the game from the ground-up using all of the knowledge I'd gained from my other two games.
It ended up being our studio's final game, so the whole team was working together on it, and I think it shows. For my part, I built on Malware Mayhem's node logic to allow the enemies move in groups and in 3 dimensions, used some fancy math to bind the arms to your hands, and designed the hot potato enemy who's quite fun to smack around.
Brush Rush
I didn't have much of a hand in this one, besides playtesting and offering occasional programming advice. Still, I couldn't just leave it out! It's a fun game :)
