Puzzle Rush | Devpost

Puzzle Rush: Finish as many puzzles as you can before time runs out!
Puzzle Rush: Score more points by placing pieces correctly in a row!
Puzzle Rush: PC and Mobile players can enter Focused Interaction mode for a more streamlined user experience.

What inspired Puzzle Rush?

The main inspiration for Puzzle Rush came from me doing puzzles with my family. Since my kids are both little, a lot of times we're doing the same puzzles over and over (and over). But each time we finish the same puzzle again we tend to get a little bit faster.

That got me thinking, what if we were to somehow turn finishing puzzles into a race of some sort, which ended up becoming the central concept of the Puzzle Rush Horizon World.

What do you do in Puzzle Rush?

Puzzle Rush is a 1-4 player experience where you are racing to complete as many puzzles as you can before time runs out. Since want the experience to be approachable for people of all skill levels there's no other failure state apart from the timer.

That said, there is a streak bonus for correctly placing pieces in a row. So if you want to be at the top of the leaderboard you will need to go fast AND not make mistakes!

How did the development of Puzzle Rush go?

Since I had never built anything in Horizon Worlds prior to Puzzle Rush, I found the first 2 Creator Challenges from the MHCP Forums to be really helpful.

The first by @SeeingBlue focused on simply modifying and publishing a largely pre-existing world was a great introduction to Desktop Editor. It really highlighted what (in my opinion) is the true strength of the platform: the ability to quickly and easily publish to desktop / mobile / and VR.

The second one by @SpaceGlitterUnicorn was really helpful for understanding the workflow, requirements, and limitations of importing assets from Blender. The example assets that were provided made the process much easier to get through; and once I had gone through it once it was way easier to plan what I needed to do for future assets.

While working through those Challenges I also started to download and dissect all of the Example Worlds. These were super helpful for being able to understand how to work with Typescript and to learn the patterns for how to organize objects within projects.

As I found parts of the Example Worlds I was considering doing something with, I began to bring them back into the World I had created for the first Challenge. This ultimately turned that world into one giant sandbox of unrelated stuff, but my driving principle was: If I could get a mechanic working there I’d be able to use that mechanic in any other World I create in the future.

At this point in my ramp up I was spending a lot of time on the “Learn” and “API reference” tabs of https://developers.meta.com/horizon-worlds.

One of the other benefits of taking this approach was that it started to give me a better sense of what the limitations of the platform were. Those would be the things that I would need to develop a custom solution for (like the grabbing mechanic in Puzzle Rush), or would outright simply avoid doing entirely.

From that point on I built a new World that would serve as the preproduction for Puzzle Rush, where I would mostly implement (and re-implement!) the core mechanics of the game until they started to feel good.

Then I cloned that World into the current version of Puzzle Rush that exists today; cleaned up the scripts; did one final reorganization of how they were structured; and then started adding in all of the features. All while consistently playtesting and polishing along the way.

What are the accomplishments that you're proud of?

There are two things that I think really stand out for the project.

The first is the streak mechanic (where you gain more score for each piece you place without getting one wrong), which ended up giving Puzzle Rush a significant amount of depth. As soon as it was added to the game it was clear that it would be the primary driver of a flow state for a player.

To double down on this we:

Give you more points based on your streak
Progressively add more VFX to the scene that scale in intensity
Pitch up the audio SFX for correctly placed pieces
And we auto fill some of the pieces for the first few puzzles so that there's a better chance that new players will get to experience this aspect of the game in at least some form

There's always more you can do, but over-all I'm pretty happy with where it ended up.

The second is the integration of Focused Interaction Mode into Puzzle Rush.

While the core puzzle piece grabbing mechanic felt pretty good on PC, our early playtesting on mobile devices left us wanting to be able to tap the pieces to move them. So that's when we began looking into how we could integrate Focused Interaction Mode into the project.

Fortunately, because of how were handling the piece grabbing to support multiplayer, switching between Focused Mode and Standard Mode was fairly seamless. Yes, there were some small issues to iron out, but ultimately the usability gains that we got on mobile (and also retroactively on PC!) were well worth it.