Building an infinite procedurally generated VR game inspired by Adventure Time

Exploring an infinite dungeon train is just one of those things you’ve always needed to do in VR but just didn’t know it yet. One of our favourite devs, Brennan Hatton, has put together that very game for the Oculus Quest! Here’s a Q&A with Brennan about how he put it together and details on how you can get your hands on this game!

1. How would you explain your VR game concept in a single sentence?

It’s an infinite train of procedurally generated dungeon carriages, where you explore and loot in virtual reality.

2. How’s it all work? What’s it like?

Passing through mountains to country-side, you explore the endless carriages of the dungeon train collecting items and loot. Every carriage is a unique adventure. From carriages open to the breeze, to hidden treasure, mysterious ruins with puzzles and non-euclidean carriages that defy the laws of physics. Find equipment, enchantments, weapons, and tools to help you loot.

3. Where’d the idea come from and how’d it grow from there?

It was inspired by an episode of adventure time, where Fin and Jake find themselves on an infinite train battling enemies and collecting loot from carriage to carriage. I originally developed a first prototype back in 2018 and received a little bit of traction although I didn’t have time to expand upon it further until recently.

4. What did you build it with? Any particular reason you chose to go that direction?

I built the game with Unity because of how easy it is to plug things together. Thanks to their community and available resources it has only taken a couple weeks over the holidays.

I am testing Unity’s new XR Interaction Toolkit currently available in preview Unity 2019.3. Its is probably the easiest VR support I have used yet, although still a little limited. I was very happy to say it does support the Oculus Quest which was my target platform from the start.

Synty Studios is a goldmine for simple themed, and well optimised art assets

I have also built my own editor tools for designing randomly generated dungeons, which has sped things up a lot.

5. Any gotchas or times when things just came crashing down that other devs might be able to learn from?

I made the mistake of trying to add an extra layer of optimisation in anticipation of the cost of a graphics upgrade. It turns out it it simply wasn’t needed, and I spent a full day doing optimisations that barely changed anything. The graphics update looked great, but the import optimisations came from the things I was adding, not optimising the existing system. I did learn a lot about performance in Unity though. It turns out Unity does a really good job with performance by default.

6. How can we try out the game?

It is in early alpha testing, so you can apply at dungeontrain.com, and follow on facebook here.

Thanks to Brennan Hatton for taking the time to chat about his new creation! Head over to dungeontrain.com, and follow all the happenings on facebook here to show your support!