Make It a Goofy Game Night in Mixed Reality with ‘Party Versus,’ Available Today on Meta Quest

Ever wish you could have a game night without the need to coordinate schedules, teach a bunch of rules, or provide a lot of snacks? That’s where Party Versus comes in. This mixed reality party game lets you create a game night with friends no matter where they are—or even make some new ones—and it’s out today on the Meta Horizon Store and for free with a subscription to Meta Quest+.

Party Versus packs more than a dozen games that are a blast to play, as well as uniquely intuitive. Activities include Sticky Potato (think “Hot Potato,” but more ridiculous), where you try to get rid of the spud in question by sticking it to walls, furniture, or even other players. In team games like Pop Pals, you have to communicate with a teammate to pop balloons as fast as you can in a specific order, and in Milky Way Moovers, you try to help cows get abducted by UFOs—but only one teammate can see exactly where the UFOs are. Party Versus accommodates between two and four players, and thanks to mixed reality, the size and layout of your room—or rooms—is a major component of the game.

I Expect You To Die and Among Us VR developer Schell Games is the studio behind Party Versus, and a lot of the lighthearted humor that infuses those games can be found in this new title. The games are short and purposefully easy to understand, while also creating situations in which you have to interact with other players and their space in ways that quickly become goofy. In some of the team-based mini-games, you and your buddy won’t see the same things inside your headsets, requiring you to try to lead each other around your rooms to find invisible elements. And then there’s the Twisted Mode, which changes up some games by flipping a few players’ rooms upside down.

To celebrate the launch of Party Versus on Quest, we sat down with Principal Design Manager and Party Versus Project Direct Shawn Patton, Principal Production Manager and Party Versus Lead Producer Kirsten Rispin, and Principal Engineering Manager and Party Versus Engineering Director John Pile. The developers explained how they approached mixed reality as a studio with extensive VR chops and how they worked to make Party Versus fun and accessible to a wide range of players.

Shawn Patton: Party Versus is a multiplayer mixed reality party game—a bunch of quick and zany games that take advantage of your physical room. It was inspired by a Jam Week project that was sort of a VR micro-activity prototype, but we ended up making it multiplayer and mixed reality.

SP: Some games are more active than others, certainly, but they all are pretty active experiences—you’re going to be moving around. When we were playtesting, we would warn people with an outer layer of clothing to remove it before starting. Most of the games are our spin on classic games like hot potato—but it’s much more accessible and fun in the MR space. Hot potatoes don’t explode in real life, but they do in Party Versus. You have games where you’re competing against each other, but you also have team games where you have to work with a partner.

John Pile: All of the games are simple and easy to understand. What makes them unique is our focus on people and furniture in mixed reality. We iterated on dozens and dozens of mini-games at various points, and we landed on simple games that are quick to understand—it really made the most sense for Party Versus. Puzzle games, things that were complicated, or things that were focused on only your space or yourself didn’t play well. The fun part is the opportunity to play with your friends and see your friends’ spaces in the game. So Party Versus is bouncing balls, hot potatoes, balloons, whatever it is off of other people’s furniture. The games that made me “look up” and see what the other person is doing are the ones that played best.

Kirsten Rispin: Leaning into that “look up” idea a bit more, we had these smaller quick games and then were trying to figure out what else could be fun—more games, more variety? So when we talk about the variety the games offer—it’s more than teams vs. not teams, it’s actually the arrangement of your room. We discovered this as we were doing all of these prototypes. Whether you’re playing Party Versus with three, four, or two rooms, we wanted to make sure there’s fun things to do no matter what you’re doing or playing. It ended up being another focus area.

SP: One of our pillars for Party Versus was “find the funny with friends.” We weren’t trying to force jokes or anything. It was more about, “What if we presented you with these absurd situations like trying to get cows underneath UFOs, but only your partner can see the UFO?” That leads to ridiculous things.

“The cow is under your bed!” It evokes a “wait, what?” response. So now you’re shouting these silly things at each other about rotten apples and blue guitars and UFOs. It makes the game a little odd and off the wall, and you find yourself saying some ridiculous things while playing that brings more fun into the experience—more so than if you were talking in a funny voice or it was something much more forced.

SP: “Find the funny with friends” was one of them. It helped us focus on subversive funness and leaned into the multiplayer with friends aspect.

The other pillar was “only in MR.” Whenever we made a game for Party Versus, we would ask ourselves: Would this be a better game in virtual reality or 2D? How about on the phone? If the answer was yes, then it’s probably not what we want. We wanted to focus on mixed reality things that make you move around, and you can only do that when you can see your surroundings.

There are a lot of things you can take advantage of using the furniture in your room. You can use items as anchors: “Oh, the UFO is by your bookshelf!” or “I’m going to throw a potato behind your couch!” The fact that a person can see your room and throw an object to a place it’s harder to get to is something only mixed reality can do, and we really tried to stay focused on that aspect.

SP: I always say: When you move from screen space games to virtual reality, you give up control of the camera. When you move into mixed reality, you give up, to a large extent, control of the level. We needed to make games that can work in any room, any size, any configuration, with any amount of furniture, and that’s both challenging and also very exciting.

It allows you to bring your room and your house into the game, and I think that’s pretty awesome. It’s also, in some ways, more accessible than the traditional virtual reality headset experience where you’re removed from everyone around you. That can be a little intimidating for new-to-VR players. I think mixed reality games are going to become gateway games for new-to-VR players. Even someone who’s a little timid can feel comfortable right away because they can see me standing in front of them. Then they get to play an awesome game on top of that, and that’s just a really nice combination.

KR: The room selection itself provides a new strategy for players. “Do I want to play in a really big open room? Do I want to play in a small room?”

From a design standpoint, we had to remain cognizant of all the different room sizes in which someone would play Party Versus. If the game were meant for people with big rooms and a player was in a small room, they may have a harder time, and ultimately that would be unfair. We had to make sure we were balancing the games—and the experience overall—so there are advantages for different room sizes to make players feel like everything is a fair go. We also had to consider people moving in different rooms to play Party Versus as well. All of these considerations weren’t evident to us up front, and we discovered them along the way.

JP: The other piece of that is, we were focused on the social piece of it more than the competitive piece. As such, it became really easy to understand that we were okay with someone gaming the system just a little bit—putting a bunch of furniture in front of you between your walls if that’s what you want to do. This is more like the little games you make up to play with your friends, like keepy-uppy, where you’re making up the rules as you go. There’s structure to the mini-games, there are winners and losers and maybe points, but it’s much more about the fun and interactions you have with each other than who took home the trophy. You feel like you had fun—even if you came in last.

KR: It also leaves you with the feeling that you could get better. I’ve played plenty of games where I’ve come in last or second-to-last and feel like I could get better—that “I’ll get you next time” sort of feeling.

SP: We’ve all played these games a lot, and it’s interesting how, even though they’re fairly simple games, there are strategies that emerge. We noticed that we’ve all gotten better and our scores have gone up over the development process. This tells me that there’s a surface level where you can simply understand the game and have fun, but there’s also room for people to strategize and get really invested in how they play.

SP: Honestly, any of the QA team could be at the top.

SP: We have a pretty extensive settings menu. We have an extended reach option. Even though there’s still some level of moving around, this allows you to reach faraway objects so you don’t have to always bend over or really stretch to reach that one corner. It can help folks who may have some mobility issues. We also have features in place to keep players safe. Because Party Versus opens portals into other players’ rooms, we do obscure real life in a few key places. When you get near those places, the game will fade into the physical world again so you can keep yourself safe. The amount of that fade is something you can adjust or set to what you’re comfortable with.

JP: One of the things that was particularly challenging is colorblindness combined with a Passthrough camera. We had to make something stand out against your Passthrough feed, but we don’t want to do something that then causes troubles for someone who’s colorblind. We spent a lot of time iterating and making sure that the colors we chose worked no matter what type of colorblindness a person may have.

SP: We often use that in the balloon game. The next balloon is brighter in color, but we also put sparkles around it so it’s very clear that it’s a different thing. There are some flashes of light within the game or we change the lighting of your room. A player can turn that off if they’re sensitive to it.

JP: And there are multiplayer safety settings that allow you to feel comfortable in your space. There’s a setting so people aren’t able to put their hands on or into other avatars, and, of course, if someone isn’t playing fair, you can boot them from the game. You can also mute and report people, too.

SP: On the audio/input side, we have separate volume sliders for every person’s voice and the music and the sound effects and, of course, the master volume. You can turn off haptics if you don’t like the vibration of the controllers or are sensitive to that. If anyone ever feels like there’s too much going on, they can make personalized adjustments to prevent sensory overload.

KR: It was great to have Shawn and the wider team’s design mind about what we didn’t have a specific setting for but we could design around. I definitely leaned on Josh Brannon, one of Schell Games’ Accessibility Champions, for Party Versus. He was on the project, and having him there doing the UI was awesome.

It’s great when you don’t have to convince the team that accessibility is something that we have to think about or find ways around. Our team already bought into making Party Versus as accessible as possible in as many ways as possible with the time and the budget we’ve been allotted. Personally, I feel it’s really important, so it’s nice to know the rest of the development team felt the same way.

SP: Well, you used the term shared space, and we have sort of two modes. There’s you in your room seeing other people’s rooms, but there’s also a shared space in the Party Versus lobby where other player avatars are in your room and sit on your couch or stand in your doorway. You can high-five people or use wands and sparklers to have a little party before you start the next game.

KR: As a team, we had to understand the space and what we’re okay with. In VR, clipping into furniture or the world around you is something that we wouldn’t do, but because we don’t have as much control over a player’s room or where they’re positioned in it, there are some naturally funny moments where someone’s shoulder may be in a player’s bookcase. We tried to optimize the experience for most scenarios and room sizes, but there are still going to be some funny edge cases, and we wanted to lean into the silliness of that.

JP: The physics within the Party Versus mini-games is pretty amazing. I can throw a hot potato, and it bounces off your couch in real time. It’s very cool. The kind of things you can do in the mini-games are very physics-based. In the lobby shared space, we’re limited in what we can do as furniture relative to us is not in the same location. Once players go back to their own rooms in the game, we can play around with the furniture and the physics.

KR: I think both. We set out to make fun and sometimes goofy moments, and then some just naturally happened. We recognized organic moments and certainly found some things that didn’t work, although parts of it did. Being able to examine, take things apart, and build on what did work was a large part of our process.

SP: I’m remembering some early games, like John was saying earlier, were more puzzle-y or too think-y. It caused people to be too insular or focused on their own thing, and it wasn’t what we wanted—regardless of humor. So we tended toward the lighter, faster-to-understand, goofier games.

JP: And I think the other thing is that our teammates—we are all kind of silly and goofy. So many of our ideas came from playing. For example, what if the hot potato was bigger? We turned it into a variant. What if it stuck to you or our furniture? Which became a variant. The funny emerged just by playing, though there were other times we tried something and then played it and were like, “Nope! Not as funny as it sounded.” Being flexible and taking a day to try out one of these things really allowed for some awesome moments where some parts could be totally broken, but we looked at each other and said, “There’s something there. We need to spend another day on this.”

SP: Big potato is such a good example because it’s like—oh, you’re just making the potato bigger. Has that really changed the game? It actually does because now it’s harder to throw it out of your room. You can hold one potato and use it as a shield to block people throwing it into your room. It actually has real gameplay results, which is great. It’s so fun.

KR: Yeah, once we did big potato, then we simply couldn’t have the same sound effects, right? It’s big now! So now that we scaled up the size, we wanted to make sure the rest of the game matches those expectations. We prioritized changing some sound effects to better match the visuals. In Sticky Potato, the potato sticks like jelly, so we added a splat sound effect to it. It’s nonsensical, but it’s awesome and so much fun. Coming up with these ideas and really delivering on them in all aspects was something we prioritized after we knew what worked.

JP: I remember being in a meeting with our Veeps and Jesse, our CEO, doubled down on the people and furniture conversations. He asked us what would make players look at each other and think about the things in their space and run around that space.

So we thought of popping balloons where players have to tell each other which balloons they have to pop and vice versa to make them look at each other. To me, that’s the kind of thing that emerges from going back to our pillars and what we’re trying to accomplish to identify games you can play in a mixed reality space with simple objects. We had the pieces, but we constantly asked ourselves: What’s the game that comes out of this? I’d never run around popping balloons in a particular order, but in Party Versus, it feels familiar because it’s simple, it makes use of your space, and it ties it together with social interaction.

KR: The cow and the UFO is another great example. It seems silly, but we’ve all seen that imagery in other places, be it as a joke, in a book, or in a movie. It’s a recognizable concept that doesn’t make a lot of sense. We built a lot around combinations of recognizable concepts, simple interactions, and the ability for people to jump in and feel like they understand and can be really good at the game right off the bat. None of the games are long because we tried longer games, and they weren’t as fun. It was either too repetitive or too much you had to process. We wanted Party Versus players to feel like they got the game, know how to play it, and will let the fun happen.

SP: We had an official rubric. The games had to have the “find the funny with friends” and “only in MR” pillars. Beyond that, we also had “learn in the moment, finish in a minute.” We also added “keep players safe.” We don’t encourage smashing into walls or objects—we did have some early games that encouraged some of that. “Have a way to be cooperative or competitive” was another—a reason to communicate, move, and interact with furniture. Those are the things we were after. Some of the games checked more boxes than others, but in general our rubric allowed us to define our ideas and test them against it.

JP: Yeah, it’s tough. It’s easy to want to throw your hand at a wall even when you’re playing a regular game of keepy-uppy in real life—let alone playing one of these games. In keeping games simple and easy to understand, we tried to keep the game instructions within Party Versus short—maybe one or two sentences. Even if you don’t fully grasp the description, you’re immediately going to see what other people in the room are doing and pick up what you’re supposed to do. There’s a lot we gain from being able to see other people, their avatars, their actions, that you don’t get from playing games on a console. It’s very different when you see someone grab a cupcake and shove it in their mouth.

JP: I saw someone do this and immediately thought it was a great idea. They crawled under their desk to hide from spike balls that were blocked by a virtual version of the same desk. When we played with our QA team, we had a competition where we played a series of mini-games together, and a couple of them developed their own strategies. The next time we played them, thinking we were the experts, they demonstrated that we were not.

KR: I keep going back to Sticky Potato and the ability to stick potatoes to other players. It was great. I don’t think I saw anybody try this outright, but we found out as we were playing with prototypes. Now I ask myself: Where can I throw a sticky potato that is the least accessible for that person to get to, and how many times can I do that? Sometimes that means I totally miss it and now it’s still in my room (or even have stuck myself with a sticky potato before). I’m the worst at spike ball, but I watch other people and pick up their strategies. People play this game in interesting ways. Our Art Director, Todd, just chucks as many spike balls out of his room as possible as a tactic. I feel like I’ve tried all the tactics—I’m just not good at that game.

JP: We iterated a bit there to try to ensure people couldn’t take advantage of space. For example, you can throw a sticky potato on somebody else's ceiling, and if it's out of reach for them because they’re shorter, well, it’s only going to sit there for a couple seconds before it drops down. We played often and did see how people tried to take advantage of space, so we were able to turn around and figure out how we could make this not devastating to other players if someone just happens to have really tall ceilings.

SP: There’s also evolved strategy or combos. Throw a sticky potato on the wall behind them so the player has to turn to get it off the wall. While they’re turned around, throw the second one on the back of their head. That’s strategy.

KR: That’s a Shawn Patton strategy right there.

SP: I feel so good every time I do that.

SP: We tried a bunch of different room arrangements and the one that got in is Twisted Mode, which basically means that some of the folks in the match will be upside down. This matters the most in games with gravity and where you’re exchanging things between the rooms because that can change how you might throw something, even if it’s a spike ball. Spike balls have variance with gravity and without. And so without gravity, having things upside down gives you different attack points, a different venue. A thing that might’ve been blocking you before isn’t now because they’re upside down. You also get these unique curves when you throw something between rooms. If you want to master the spike ball variant that has gravity in Twisted Mode, you really have to plan how you lob it in another player’s room.

JP: Of course, furniture also has a lot to do with your line of sight. If I have a desk that I’m trying to throw something over, and Shawn is in his room upside down, I can bounce it off of his ceiling, whereas in non-Twisted Mode it might be a harder shot. Even in these quick 60- to 90-second games, you have to evaluate how spaces come together that could possibly give you an advantage.

KR: Because we’re strong in VR, we thought we were just going to hammer this thing out. We went into development with a lot of assumptions about how Party Versus would work based on best practices we established from VR. And it’s not to say that none of them transferred over, but a lot of them didn’t. We realized many of the core ideas we wanted to lean into didn’t quite transfer the same way we thought. We had this moment of realization fairly early on: We can’t make assumptions—we can’t develop on assumptions. We can say, “We think this works,” but we have to test it.

That became a big thing. We can’t just say, “We think it works,” or, “It works in VR, so we’re going to start building as though it works.” We had to think it works, test it, and then prove to ourselves that it works. So it was almost back to the drawing board in some of these cases. That was something I wasn’t expecting at first, but we luckily stumbled on it pretty quickly at the beginning and were able to account for that as we were moving on through development.

JP: From a technical side, I can’t underestimate the challenge we had, especially early on, in being able to build out and test the assumptions that Kirsten mentioned. In a virtual world created by a designer or an artist, it’s a virtual representation. In mixed reality, I have to connect my headset, scan the room, have someone else do something similar, have those two games networked together, and then be able to test these concepts after getting that data. Early on in development, the tools just weren’t there. The XR Simulator, which is something that came out about a year ago, helped with that significantly and allowed us to save data. We built some of our own tools so you could reuse the same kind of room environment over and over again. But just getting that raw data that’s coming from the headset, getting it onto the machine to then test out any of these mini-games was incredibly hard.

This is all new tech—new tech coming from the hardware and from the operating system. We had to rethink what we could solve and what we had to leave to the operating system and say, “Yeah, this might not be perfect right now, but Meta’s working on it, and by the time we release it, it’ll be good enough for us to be able to take advantage of whatever we might need.” An example of this is the room setup process. Early in development, a player would have to manually scan every object in their room, which was really cumbersome for players just to get started. Now, you can just look around your room, and it scans and classifies things automatically. We knew this is what we needed for casual players to be able to get started quickly.

SP: We also realized the more things you put on the ground, the harder it is to move around in mixed reality because the virtual items are obscuring your physical floor. That’s why we don’t have a lot of gravity on our items or they come to rest very quickly so they’re not getting lost in your physical furniture. These are some of the considerations you need to think about—where things are going to spawn, how they’re going to act physically, all these things matter because you’re in mixed reality.

JP: Yeah. Or for example, throwing things up in the air. Something we realized is that people have ceiling fans, and they’re not often caught on the scans. This is something you don’t deal with in VR, in a purely virtual space.

The challenges of humans and their avatars in mixed reality were also very difficult to get right because it’s very different in virtual reality. If you’re in Horizon Worlds, everyone is at the same eye level while walking around, and that works for a purely virtual environment. When seated next to someone who’s standing, there may be some purposeful height differential—but the virtual experience just works. As soon as you enter mixed reality, you have to deal with the realities of a game that’s played in a physics system that is relative to people’s actual height and their physical space and the way they take up space.

In some VR games, you can kind of fake it. You can just slightly move your head to dodge something. A one-to-one match with a player’s hands and head makes all the difference when you’re developing a mixed reality game. Sure, I could have arms that reach out twice as far because that’s a cool gameplay mechanic, but when I’m playing ball, I need to know that my ball hits your hand, and your hand is exactly where it’s at in my vision. I don’t think we realized how significant of a challenge that would be until we had the opportunity to do something different in mixed reality and it became super important.

KR: We were fortunate to have partners at Meta who understood and believed in the game, and they worked with us to be able to find solutions. We were able to have this one-to-one matching because we all knew and recognized how important it was in the mixed reality space and for our game to continue to feel good and be fun.

SP: Give it a try!

KR: Yeah, we’re excited for people to get in and play with friends and family and people they meet in future matches.

JP: Yes, Party Versus is a great game to play with friends and family to stay connected with them. A major part of the game is the social aspect of having a great time with friends and family.

You can bring a goofy game night home today with Party Versus—it’s now available on the Meta Horizon Store for $9.99 USD, or for free with a subscription to Meta Quest+.