After releasing Squadon: Mercs that I worked on for nearly a full year I didn’t think I would be building something again anytime soon. Sitting on the sofa talking to my kids about it they started coming up with ideas for 2025’s game. My kids wanted another VR game where we can build and test and play together. We wanted something with motion controls since we’ve been enjoying Gorilla Tag and Animal Company and piloting in Squadon: Mercs. I wanted a quick win with retro graphics. My kids kept thinking of another game with flying and combat. At first I thought of Joust, but couldn’t see a quick way to control the flying mount. My oldest suggested flying blimps, and that reminded me of Vs. Balloon Fight. From there it all clicks, a simple arena, some platforms, some bouncy obstacles, flapping motion for flying, flapping up and forward like swimming.
The prototype was together in a week. Movement physics and collision detection, with capsules, cylinders, and spheres. Next week was the spites and the floating balloons following the players, hand tracking and the beginning of the motion controls were in. The last week was polish and a lot of testing on the motion, it was very wonky at first and took a lot of refinement. Even now I feel the balloons could use some larger hit-boxes and maybe some float time at the top of a flap but it all came together.
So thats a wrap on Flappy Flap Balloon Bonk. I had a lot of fun working through the problems with the kids, watching them test out the motion controls and playing together in races to the top level and chasing each other around in the arena.
Again I really have to thank the Babylon.js team. The speed of iteration is incredible and being able to make changes, hit save, have the kids hit refresh in the browser and test out the changes in vr without having to take off the headset or reinstall an app was amazing.