Hello! I’ve been hard at work on a new VR game called Going Loco. It’s a fun and accessible puzzle game for the Meta Quest where you have to complete the missing parts of a map to guide the cars, trains and planes to safety.
You have a set of Tiles in your ‘Palette’, which can be opened by flipping either hand palm-up, allowing the other hand to grab a Tile and place it. My friend Gaz had some great suggestions for improvements, like using the face buttons on the controllers to spin the Tiles (like you might in Tetris) before placing them, avoiding some unnecessary re-manipulation of the Tiles to get them in the correct rotation.
You have some control over time. By opening the Palette or placing a Tile, you can slow down time to build enough roads or track for the oncoming vehicles. And once everything is in place, you can press a button to speed up as well, to see the events unfold faster if you’ve been replaying a level for a while!
You’re graded on your performance in real time, so abusing the slowdown system may cost you a Star in your 3-star level score, and likewise by using the speed-up feature, you can improve your speed. But you have to pay attention to the route vehicles will take to avoid some explosive consequences of not clearing the path.
The game uses several “Low Poly” asset packs from Synty Studios, which I feel really set the colourful, detailed and clean aesthetic of the game. I also used over 20 tracks from BenSound for the music, which I play with heavily – adding low-pass filters to make the dialogue more clear, and slowing down or speeding up to match the game speed.
I had the original idea for this game in 2012, and made a very basic prototype for iPhone, which is sadly lost to time now. But I think the mechanic actually works better in VR, where you can physically grab the Tiles naturally using another great Unity asset, Autohand, which handles all the hand-poses and physics associated with grappling the objects. Having these tools available is great, because it means a solo developer like me can concentrate on the gameplay without getting bogged down in the details. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and try to see as far as one person can.
Going Loco is out now on the Meta Quest Store and is priced at $9.99 (there may be variations for local currencies). You can download the press kit here. Please get in contact if you’d like any further information.
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