Starry Townlet

🌟 Inspiration

Horizon is all about making connections — in fact, my husband and I met online in VR whilst we were creating digital worlds and avatars. We wanted to create a world with connections in mind. So we built a world with a selection of fun "getting to know you" party games to be played with either a partner or friends. My vision was to bring people together for fun, friendship, and chill times.

🎲 What It Does

Come to this beautiful world, explore, chill and maybe play a game or two. There's even a scavenger hunt in addition to 4 board games. The games can be played with or without the dice and counters - Game 1 is a "Getting to Know You" game to be played with your partner or friends. Game 2 is a Fun Facts Trivia style Quiz, where the facts are really quite incredible! Game 3 has questions for families or a younger audience. Game 4 is Snakes and Ladders. There's also a Coin Treasure Scavenger Hunt! Also why not ride the flying Boat — all while exploring the cozy, fictional town of Starry Townlet.

🛠️ How We Built It

• I first came up with the concept and all the visuals
  • All assets, models, meshes, and textures were custom created by myself and my husband using Blender plus Substance Painter and Photoshop.
  • We then imported everything into Horizon, where we added:
• Lighting, animation
• Sound effects, coding
• Ambient visual effects etc

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

• Time! Creating everything by hand (especially the mesh) took a big chunk of our schedule.
• We realized too late that having a coder on our team would’ve allowed us to implement:
  • More functionality
  • More interactive features
  • Cool custom-coded logic

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

• This is our second world built for Horizon — as a 2-person team, that’s a big deal!
• We’re especially proud of making our textures look like they had normals (even though they didn’t!). We discovered a unique method to simulate the effect.
• Also every single mesh is custom made by myself and very low poly.
• The level of detail was something that took time but was worth it

📚 What We Learned

We developed a new technique baking all materials and textures together for optimal performence using a blend of:

• Blender
• Substance Painter
• Photoshop

It really helped bring depth to our textures without using actual normal maps.

🚀 What's Next for Starry Townlet

• After launching our first Quiz Gameboards, we plan to introduce:
  • Many more game overlays (for themes like quizzes, Ludo, Never Have I Ever, etc.)
  • IWP purchases for themed counters, bespoke dice, and accessories
  • Wearables — we used to design avatar clothing for another platform and plan to bring that creativity here too!
• We are planning to open up some building to have teleports to another world where you can walk around inside (we have already started on the church interior

🤝 We’d love to collaborate with a coder to take things to the next level!

Thanks for checking out Starry Townlet — where fun meets connection ✨

Built With

• blender
• painter
• photoshop
• substance
• typescript