Catcha Matcha

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  Collective cat sandbox. When your cat needs to go, this is where he runs to.

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  Walk around with your egg incubator to warm the egg

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  Use your Limpol gun to clean the sandbox

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  Prepare and serve coffee and cupcakes

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  Prepare and serve coffee and cupcakes

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  Prepare and serve coffee and cupcakes

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  14 collectionable cats

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  Walk around with your incubator to keep the egg warm

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  When you walked enough, see the egg hatching

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  A new friend is born!

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  Cat Café

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Inspiration

We were inspired by a real cat cafe in São Paulo, the thrill of tycoon games, and the joy of collecting virtual creatures. We wanted to merge these into a single, vibrant social experience where relaxation and adventure go paw-in-paw.

What it does

Catcha Matcha Island is a paradise where you can work at a cat cafe, befriend felines, and have lots of fun with your friends. Serve coffee and cupcakes, earn Cat Coins, and collect 14 unique cats. Bond with your cats through care and love, feeding them, playing hide-and-seek and destroying their poop with a laser gun to keep them clean. Find treasures hidden in the island. Test your skills on island parkour and team up with friends to mine giant crystals to earn extra Cat Egg Shards. Trade the Egg Shards in the shop for an egg and walk around with your incubator to warm your egg until it hatches.

How we built it

We started the project remixing the Sim Tycoon Template. For the environment, the Cat Cafe, the island terrain and other 3D models, we started drafting with Worlds Desktop Editor Gen AI, and later we refined the meshes and textures. Key systems like the customer serving mechanics, cat behaviour and animations, egg animations and hatching algorithm, and the cleaning gun were scripted to create a seamless and engaging loop. We also customized the HUD with messages and alerts to players.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several technical hurdles. Beyond the initial challenge of synchronizing object states and the game economy, the egg incubator script was particularly difficult. We had to find a way to sync the server with local scripts to track camera movement for a reasonably accurate step count, all while ensuring the cat spawned correctly at the exact right moment.

We also struggled with the UI. We initially planned for many more in-world menus and tutorials,but we quickly noticed that the performance and responsiveness of the UIs began to drop significantly.

Debugging performance issues was also tough due to limited documentation. We frequently ran into editor inconsistencies, such as objects randomly losing their prop references, general slowness, and freezes that forced us to restart the server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of creating a world with such diverse gameplay that still feels cohesive. The game mechanics and economy was designed in a way that players that prefer to only work in the cat cafe - not doing the parkour and mining gameplay, can enjoy the game at its fullest, and vice-versa, players that enjoy more the parkour and mining mechanics can focus on that do less work on the cat cafe.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about the development process in Horizon Worlds. We loved the ability to work collaboratively as a group in the editor at the same time.

We also learned to lean heavily on the Gen AI features, which were fantastic. We used the generators for ambient sounds, SFX, environments, and especially for prototyping meshes. The simple drag-and-drop functionality from the asset store was also a huge time-saver.

We also learned the value of community resources—the videos on the MHCP channel helped us debug and solve several problems.

What's next for Catcha Matcha

Our immediate priority is to refine the existing mechanics and fix bugs—we definitely planned more features than we could execute during the competition period! Our roadmap includes:

• Making the cat inventory selectable directly from the HUD/a button.
• Adding 15 new cats (which are currently in progress).
• Introducing new quests and rewards.
• Adding visual feedback for the cafe's "streak" mechanic.
• Giving the cats more life with 8 new emotions and faces.
• Implementing unique personalities for each cat, which will unlock special bonuses and abilities when equipped.
• Integrating haptic mechanics (like rubbing the egg or petting the cat).
• Adding new equippable assets for both players and their cats. *Add new recipes(Matcha coming soon)

Built With

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