GAMEPOLY | Devpost

What it does

In GAMEPOLY you don’t play as a hero—you play as a studio. Up to four players sit around a virtual board and roll dice to move through the game industry: FPS, Horror, RPG, Sports, Racing, Adventure and more. Each genre is represented by illustrated property cards and tiles, and you can invest in them, upgrade them with DLC, or pay brutal “royalties” when someone else owns them.

Every turn is a small production drama:

Land on a genre tile and decide whether to buy the project or pass.

Draw a lucky (or unlucky) card that might give you funding, steal from another studio, or force you to spend three turns fixing a critical bug.

Watch your money tick up and down on a live HUD that shows not only your balance but everyone else’s, so table talk and mind games are guaranteed.

The goal is simple and evil: stay solvent while everyone else goes bankrupt.

How we built it

The world is built entirely in Meta Horizon, using the Desktop Editor and 100% TypeScript logic for all core systems:

A turn manager that controls player order, dice rolls and movement.

A money manager that tracks each studio’s budget and keeps all HUDs in sync.

Systems for property ownership, DLC upgrades, rent calculation and elimination when a player hits zero.

A full event system for lucky cards, bugs, penalties and corner tiles.

For the UI, we combined NoesisGUI with Horizon logic to create a responsive HUD: per-player displays of money, timers and messages, plus property and luck cards that pop up with their own artwork and text.

Art-wise, we leaned heavily on GenAI to generate a unified visual language for genres and tiles—those painterly cards and casillas you see for Horror, Fantasy, FPS, Sports, Racing, etc.—and then integrated them as textures inside Horizon.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing a board game in a real-time social environment is harder than it looks. Some highlights:

Keeping HUDs in sync: we needed every player to see everyone else’s money update instantly without flooding the network. That led us to build a shared money map and a broadcast/event system instead of one-off updates.

Turn logic vs. freedom: players want to run around and explore, but the game needs strict turns. Designing a flow where the system feels authoritative without feeling restrictive took several iterations.

Card UX in VR and mobile: property and luck cards had to be readable, feel like physical objects, and still work with different input modes. Getting the layout, timing and visibility right was a constant back-and-forth.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We’re proud of building a game that feels like a real tabletop experience inside Horizon:

A full economic loop with income, expenses, investment and elimination that actually works over many rounds.

A visual identity where every genre has its own personality but still feels part of the same universe.

A HUD that makes it easy to read the state of the game at a glance: whose turn it is, who is rich, who is about to die financially.

And most of all, seeing players trash-talk, negotiate and panic exactly like in a physical board game night.

What we learned

GAMEPOLY taught us a ton about building systems-heavy games in Horizon:

How to structure TypeScript components so that managers (turns, money, cards, time) stay decoupled but talk cleanly through events.

How far we can push NoesisGUI for complex HUDs that update per player without breaking immersion.

How to blend GenAI art with hand-tuned UI so the world feels cohesive instead of like a collage.

It also reinforced a simple lesson: if you give players money, dice and ways to screw each other over, they will absolutely use all of them.

What’s next for GAMEPOLY

We’re just getting started. On the roadmap:

More genres and properties to expand the board and change the meta.

Advanced lucky cards with mini-events and temporary modifiers (like boosts to specific genres or shared disasters).

Progression systems: cosmetic studios, alternate boards and themed seasons.

Deeper stats and leaderboards so studios can track their win rates, total earnings and most-played genres across sessions.

GAMEPOLY began as a love letter to board games and game dev chaos. Now we want to keep evolving it into the go-to “sit down and play a full match” experience inside Horizon.