This weekend, I started working on a new project—MR Asteroid, a mixed reality take on the classic Asteroid game. The whole thing came about because I’ve been trying to switch over to the Meta SDK for another project, Chummy Waters, my chill fish tank game. I built the demo using the Oculus Integration Toolkit, but that’s deprecated now. Every time I tried porting Chummy Waters over, I ran into issues—especially with things like the new room detection system, which works differently now.
Keeping It Simple
To learn the SDK and avoid getting overwhelmed, I figured I’d start with something simple—Asteroid. Here’s the basic setup:
- Controls:
- Grip for thrust
- Trigger to shoot
- Joystick to move a nav dot for the ship to follow
- Your ship tracks and faces the nav dot, making steering tricky since you drift in space and need to “turn and burn” to change momentum.
- Asteroids fly through your room, and you can either avoid or destroy them. Hit one, you lose a life. Three lives, and it’s game over.
Features So Far
I’ve added a bunch of basic but fun features:
- Particle effects for thrusters, explosions, and asteroid destruction
- A simple HUD that shows lives and score
- Basic sounds to give it a little life
- All the models are basic shapes (because I can’t model for anything)—the ship’s made of cubes, and so are the asteroids, for now.
The Gameplay Loop
The core loop is solid: shoot asteroids, avoid getting hit, and rack up points. It’s pretty fun already—so much so that I tend to playtest longer than I need to! I even played with an Initial D soundtrack, giving the whole game this cool space-drifting vibe. I messed around with an AI to generate some custom eurobeat music about space ships and blasting asteroids, and it kind of works!
Next Steps
It’s looking good enough that I’m planning to release it on the Meta store eventually. I’ve got the app set up, came up with the name MR Asteroid, and even generated some logos and artwork. The game’s close to being store-ready—just need to fix a few bugs and polish things up. Honestly, not bad for a couple of days of dev work, and it’s a great way to get comfortable with the new Meta SDK.
