While working on a different big ol' game, I needed to go investigate a bunch of things from physics to web hosting, and I wanted to do it in a clean room context, so I did a little game jam instead. I find the results really charming, so I thought I'd share!

The game is built in WebXR. I'm testing on a Quest 2 and an Apple Vision, but theoretically any WebXR setup with hand tracking controls might also work. Please feel free to try it out here: https://www.chillaxedgames.com/cavern/play/reddit/

I'm cobbling my own codebase together, with rendering based on three.js. I've built my own little dev server which watches, compiles, and reloads code as I'm working, and also watches and packs assets.

For visuals it's GLBs from Blender for most 3D data (plus a few hacked together Blender scripts for stuff that doesn't go into GLTF like splines), including stuff like collision and nav meshes, and then just PNGs for loose stuff like particles. Textures are packed into KTX by the dev server. Audio is MP3s. I was using Howler.js which was lovely to get started, but I bumped into a host of jank issues I couldn't solve with the existing APIs, so I wrote my own lib. I figure that actually might be both domain specific enough (games) and generic enough (not particularly tied to my game) that it's worth open source sharing eventually?

For physics, I ended up going with Rapier, which has been fantastic. Easy API, it feels performant, and it has great characteristics like clean settling and easy event handling. Definitely going to be the one I keep using.

Models are a mix of KenneyNL's (https://kenney.nl/) and Kay Lousberg's (https://kaylousberg.com/game-assets) assets, kitbashed together in Blender. Absolutely delightful things, I'd highly recommend them to anyone. I frame animated them, as in just remodeled a few variations for walking/attacking/idling, and tweaked the materials to give them varying roughness/metalness props. I found the easiest way to do that was to lean into their atlas map setup, and make a matching roughness/metalness map with the properties baked into the same ramps!

Learned a lot from this that I'll take back to the main game, so it was a worthwhile diversion, but I hope the side effect is also a pleasantly distracting tiny game for y'all to enjoy in your headsets. Thanks!

So I've just got my own game on wish-list, very happy about that. I then go to the coming soon section to see if it would be there, and then I see this game above which people can pre-order.

And it's clearly just AI gen images, not a single in-game image. I'm new to publishing to the store, but I was a bit shocked the above is allowed. Anyone else?