I’ve been working on a new project I’m calling Metaverse Survivor—essentially a mixed reality take on Vampire Survivors with some unique elements for MR. The idea is to blend that addictive, wave-based gameplay with a meta twist. It’s mostly a 2D, flatscreen experience but with some mixed reality features built in, and I’m developing it primarily for Meta Quest headsets.
The Premise
In Metaverse Survivor, you, the player, jack into your job in the metaverse using your headset. You control an avatar whose mission is to debug, fix, and protect the users and systems within the metaverse. But it’s not a simple desk job—there are waves of malicious code, memes, and even packet storms that are trying to break everything.
As you fight off these threats, you collect money, food, XP, and other items to level up. At each level, you get a random set of skills to choose from, which adds a nice progression element. It gets progressively harder, but your skills grow too. Think of it as a never-ending battle to keep the metaverse from descending into chaos.
Oh, and in true meme fashion, XP comes in the form of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce bottles, because why not?
Simple Controls, Complex Fun
One of the things I’m focusing on is keeping the controls simple. For a game like this, especially in mixed reality, you don’t want overly complicated inputs. So, for now, I’m sticking with the basics:
- Move
- Aim
- Dash
- Standard UI controls
That’s it. It’s enough to keep things engaging but not overwhelming. Since it’s being built for the Meta Quest, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to learn about how inputs and controls work in mixed reality. A lot of it’s new to me, so it’s been a fun process of figuring things out as I go.
Proof of Concept
I’ve already managed to throw together a rough proof of concept that runs on the headset. So far, I’ve got the following:
- Player character with basic movement and attacks.
- Enemy spawner that generates waves of baddies.
- A floating game window for your standard UI elements (score, health, etc.).
- Score and XP tracking.
- An NPC dialogue window for interactions.
Since this is mostly flat/2D, I’m taking a similar approach to Meta’s metaverse vision—keeping it accessible across different platforms. My goal is to make the game playable on headsets, computers, phones, and even the web. So, I started by building out the basic mechanics for the computer version, which helps me rapidly iterate and test things.
What I’ve Built So Far
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s in the game at this point:
- World tiles: Basic environment setup with colliders for the player, terrain, NPCs, and enemies.
- Ranged attacks for the player, with floating damage text that pops up when you hit enemies.
- Enemy deaths: When enemies die, they drop XP (BBQ sauce bottles, obviously), and the player picks them up to increase their score.
The combat and leveling system are working, but the enemy movement is… well, it sucks right now. They just run at you in a straight line, which gets boring fast.
Pathfinding Woes (and Wins)
So, here’s the thing—I need to give enemies a better way to move, and the solution seems to be A* (A-star) pathfinding. Problem is, buying a good pathfinding system in the Unity Asset Store costs over 100 “dollerydoos,” and I’m way too cheap for that. Plus, I have ChatGPT, so why not just build it myself?
Building Pathfinding
I started by setting up a world grid and adding terrain, colliders, and player/NPC positions to the system. Then, I wrote a basic pathfinding script to help the NPCs find their way to the player without crashing into walls or obstacles.
After a lot of trial and error, I managed to:
- Debug the NPC paths: I added a visual display showing how the NPCs calculate their routes. It’s super useful for testing and tweaking.
- Add smarter enemy behavior: Now, instead of enemies beelining for the player, they navigate around walls and obstacles.
But, there’s still a problem. When I add more NPCs, Unity tends to crash. So clearly, I need to optimize the pathfinding script. Not sure how yet, but I’ll figure it out as I go.
So that’s where I’m at with Metaverse Survivor. It’s been a wild ride balancing flatscreen gameplay with MR elements, and there’s still a ton to work out—especially on the optimization side. But it’s coming together, and honestly, it’s a blast to build.
[Insert concept art here of the player avatar fighting off waves of digital enemies with BBQ sauce bottles scattered around]
There’s a long road ahead, but I’m excited to keep hacking at it and see where it goes.
