{"id":61685,"date":"2025-03-29T01:56:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T00:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/?p=61685"},"modified":"2025-03-29T02:13:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T01:13:24","slug":"whos-been-going-loco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/?p=61685","title":{"rendered":"Who’s been Going Loco?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello! I’ve been hard at work on a new VR game called Going Loco<\/a><\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The game uses several “Low Poly” asset packs from Synty Studios<\/a>, which I feel really set the colourful, detailed and clean aesthetic of the game. I also used over 20 tracks from BenSound<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. Please get in contact<\/a> if you’d like any further information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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