Score! Play Mini Golf, Badminton, Pickleball, Hockey, and Bowling in Mixed Reality with ‘Home Sports,’ Launching Today

Throw some strikes, serve some aces, and bag some birdies without ever leaving your living room with Home Sports. Resolution Games’ new title offers five casual sports for you to play alone or with friends and uses mixed reality to bring the court, alley, rink, and green into whatever space you have available.

With Home Sports, you can take part in five different activities—bowling, mini golf, badminton, hockey, and pickleball—and make them as relaxed or as competitive as you like. The MR title brings all of them into your own space and adapts the room around you. Home Sports also makes use of Meta Quest’s Boundaryless mode and Passthrough features so you can even walk from room to room and sport to sport.

Resolution Games is an old hand at developing in mixed reality—last month, it released MR shooter Spatial Ops, and it created its own racket sport for MR in 2023 with Racket Club. We sat down with Home Sports Producer Clarisse Blondy and Resolution Games Technical Lead Linnéa Granlund to talk about making games in mixed reality, picking the sports for Home Sports, and adapting the game to fit in your living room.

Exactly! We created Home Sports to be a collection of fun social sports, all brought to life in a mixed reality experience that’s perfect for players of all ages. Whether you’re in the mood for some silly fun with friends or eager to show off your skills, this game has something for everyone.

As for the inspiration, as soon as we tried mixed reality, we realized it opened players up to even more accessible experiences. So we wanted to make a very straightforward, easy to pick up and play game that was still fun and engaging, and sports are a great way of reaching this goal!

Yes, the MR aspect of Home Sports was central in the game’s creation, as it is only playable in mixed reality. This allowed us to fully embrace additional APIs. Now players can experience advanced mixed reality such as the Boundaryless feature, enabling players to move freely across courts, courses, rinks, and lanes, but also to support both colocated and online multiplayer gameplay.

The mixed reality nature of the game really adds a level of comfort to players within the game that brings things to a new level.

We know that our players are in very different surroundings when they’re playing Home Sports. That’s why we wanted to make sure we could adapt to as many play spaces as possible. We managed this by allowing players to choose between five different sizes using a very intuitive setup. From there, we had to make sure that all the sports would feel and play the same, no matter the size you picked. It has been a lot of work to find the right way to scale up and down our physics to make it as seamless as possible.

On top of that, we used the Boundary API, specifically the Boundaryless feature, to allow players to simply move freely around the game elements. Thanks to this, we unlocked a new level of freedom for players that feels more dynamic and less restrictive.

And if they want to, they can even move seamlessly from one room to another, or go grab batteries for their controllers or take a water break, all without having to pause or exit the game. Even sitting back and watching their friends play remains a smooth, immersive experience.

We had a few different criteria when defining which sports would make it in:

• First, it had to be a sport that speaks to the broadest audience possible. The relationship between the gear and the action of what to do should be understood instantly by anyone, no matter age, culture, nationality, and so on.
• Second, the sport essence needed to be preserved when reduced to a miniaturized scale.
• Lastly, we had to make sure the player is capable of doing the movement in their living space.

As such, we ended up with five different sports that fit these criteria: pickleball, hockey, bowling, mini-golf, and badminton.

Yes, there were several important learnings that we were able to take from Racket Club, including physics (which was a big one!), bot behavior, and the importance of staying true to an audience (with Home Sports, the audience difference from Racket Club is more casual rather than competitive).

It’s true we’ve been working with both MR and VR for quite a while—we’re approaching our 10-year anniversary as a studio in January, actually! So the list of what has changed could go on for quite a while.

But overall, since we’ve been working with both since pretty much the beginning, I will say we have been fortunate to make the transition from black-and-white Passthrough to full-color Passthrough early on (thanks to Quest Pro), which has been interesting. With full color, blending virtual and physical surroundings is all that more important for MR games, one aspect of which is movement. Through full-color Passthrough—as well as more technologies enabling movements, such as the Boundaryless feature—we could be bolder in our approach.

And since Home Sports is an MR-only project, we had to make sure the blending between virtual and physical was as seamless as possible. This was eventually achieved through trial and error, as is often the case when dealing with the latest and most innovative technologies.

The biggest challenge was to make it feel good no matter what play space size you were dealing with. For example, in our trial and error, we would find that we could get it to feel really good on the smallest size, but then it perhaps didn’t translate as well to the biggest size. Since we wanted to enhance the muscle memory to the level that you don’t need to re-learn if you play on different sizes, we ended up putting a lot of love into that.

Definitely! One of the great things about MR is that it allows players to feel more freedom to move (i.e. they’re less tentative to move around), so it’s a lot easier to convey a sports fantasy. But still, not everyone has room for half a badminton court in their living room (I know that I don’t!), so we had to adapt to the sports. However, we also wanted to keep the essence of the sports while making it as accessible and immediately fun as possible. So we did two things:

• Adapted the physics to allow the sports to fit in smaller and larger play spaces (while keeping the muscle memory).
• Provided our own twist on the sports—they are miniaturized versions after all!—including simplifying some of the rules, adding some “helpers,” and taking some liberties with gears and ball sizes. Hockey in Home Sports is a great example—the result is a mix between hockey and air hockey, adapted to focus on defense and slap shot, yet conveys the fun of playing with a hockey stick and puck.

Physics is probably the part that we worked on the most. In doing so, we had three main challenges:

• Create physics that are realistic: Our goal in making Home Sports was never to create five different sport simulations, but we had to make sure the physics were credible to the players. To do so, we had to understand the needs of each sport and make sure we made the best out of our physics engines. We are actually using different physics solutions for different sports!
• Make sure the feel of the game within each sport is still fun: As we said, it’s not simulation, but it still needs to be a good, satisfying experience to hit the ball or slapshot that puck. We had to also make sure it was behaving the way a player would enjoy, and we discovered that it doesn’t always mean being realistic.
• Have the physics adapt to different play spaces: This was especially tricky, as it’s not been a straightforward path to finding the right equations and the right parameters to preserve the muscle memory on a small and a big court at the same time, while also maintaining the quality and nuances of the physics we crafted. But we did it.

In the end, after fine tuning and refining until the last moment, we succeeded and are very proud of the end product.

We haven’t run any deep tests, but we’re definitely going to keep an eye out in our next bowling team-building event at the studio!

However, what we can tell you is that we have a practice mode as well as several drills for each sport to help players improve their skills, and those have definitely helped our testers improve at Home Sports.

We at Resolution Games really feel that new technology is changing the way we play games, and the mixed reality capabilities of the Meta Quest 3 line of headsets enables an ease of playing some of our favorite casual sports like never before. Home Sports is the ultimate example of this.

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Start warming up and get ready to compete—Home Sports is available now in the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.