Transform Your Room Into a Spaceship Using Mixed Reality With ‘Starship Home’, Out Now for Meta Quest
Prepare for liftoff! Today is the launch day for an intergalactic adventure like you’ve never seen before with Starship Home from Creature, a mixed reality game that utilizes the unique passthrough features of the Meta Quest 3 family of headsets to transform your surroundings into a spaceship fit for whimsical deep space exploration.
To learn more about Starship Home we caught up with Mark Schramm, Director of Engineering at Creature!
Mark Schramm: Our studio head and creative director, Doug North Cook, came up with the idea two years ago after a massage and created a pitch deck. When he showed it to me I was immediately drawn to the idea of raising alien house plants, dreaming with them and traveling the galaxy. It was a solid, thought out deck, but it also left enough room for my own interpretation of what the player would be doing. Everyone understands "how plants work" and everyone wants to "punch it" to enter hyperspace. I think that's why this idea was so strong. Not only do people immediately get it, but everyone we talked to and explained what our game is about, had so many ideas of their own. That is when you know you have a great pitch.
During the course of development, Chris Hanney (Space Pirate Trainer, Shredders) and I took an excursion from our usual role (Senior Producer for Chris, Engineering Director for me) and we started fleshing out a story. With great support from Xalavier Nelson (El Paso, Elsewhere, Clickolding), we landed on this story of intergalactic adventure and discovery. A story in which the player is wrongly delivered a parcel containing spaceship parts, asked to reassemble and fly it back to its intended recipient. Of course, things happen, plants fall mysteriously ill, planets become silent and it is up to the player to find out the origin of The Blight. Bit of a spoiler, but plants do not only dream, they also emit music! Throughout their journey, players will unlock more of their tunes and maybe even restore harmony. It’s out there, for sure, but in the end it is a story about discovery, not only of different worlds but also of personal responsibility. Something we felt was working extraordinary well in the medium that is Mixed Reality.
MS: We set out to build a chill and relaxing game and create a world where you can vibe at your own pace. Players won’t be dodging lasers and crawling on the floor like in our sister game Laser Dance by Thomas Van Bouwel (which is also part of the Creature game label). Instead, we want you to feel at home inside your own home. While traveling the galaxy, the player will interact with starship components, fuel the engine, send and receive items from the airlock, look at alien worlds and interact with holograms. And of course, they will be taking care of plants and finding places to put them. In playtesting we even had players clear real world shelves to give our plants a nicer spot to be in (but tidying up your living room is definitely not a requirement. Leave the chores for another day!).
MS: Starship Home is a feature-length narrative adventure game. In our story, the player will travel to different worlds, look for, dream with and ultimately heal different plant specimens that all seem to share an otherworldly connection with each other. There are moments in the game where the player is let loose and can travel to different planets on their own accord and others, where the story guides the player to discover what has happened to the galaxy.
MS: Plants dream, at least some very unique ones in our game do. The player will be able to dream with them and experience their environment, their memories and their life through their (sometimes not so metaphorical) eyes. How does a plant with a massive eyeball perceive its world? Is rain just tears from other plants? And how do ethereal energy plants grow? We’re definitely going to weird and psychedelic places here. These dreams are short Mixed Reality experiences that inspire awe and wonder and are great for sharing with friends as a first MR experience.
MS: Our story revolves around eight dreamer plants. Each plant is unique, from a separate planet, but somehow they are all connected. While alien fauna isn’t the focus of the game, there are other sentient beings around. Some will contact you, some will give you helpful information and others have their own agenda. The player will also encounter friendly critters (no spiders, I promise!), often in the dreams of plants.
MS: We designed the gameplay loop so that a player could keep playing for however long they want, or finish single chunks of a specific gameplay beat and then take a break. Besides the main story, we see players hopping in and hanging out with the plants, taking care of them, maybe experiencing their dreams again and then jumping back into the story. After the story concludes, the player is free to keep the plants and decorate their space with them. We really wanted to make a game that didn’t just end with a credits sequence, but instead rewards the player with a genuinely relaxing space they can just vibe in. With multitasking on Quest, there is no better place to watch a movie, all while in orbit around a gas giant and hanging out with unique plants (Just make sure to not sit next to the tentacle plant for too long, it can get a bit handsy!).
MS: A big challenge was to believably show objects in your environment when rendering “photorealistic” objects is not possible yet. Our art director Ashley Pinnick (Tilt Brush, Cosmonious High, Slimeball!) came up with our unique art style that blends stylized objects with passthrough tinting. In short, we are dialing up the realism of our virtual objects, while tuning down the realism of the real world, making them blend together in a unique visual experience. Another fun challenge was to create meaningful gameplay in variable spaces, something every Mixed Reality developer has to deal with in their own way. In our starship, we work together with the player to provide that meaning. Since they place objects, we have a better understanding of what the layout & navigable space of their room is. We can then use this information to build our game around it.
MS: Building a plausible world outside and inside of the player’s room was definitely the most rewarding. It’s weird, but we are trying to convince you that your room is a spaceship, while also always acknowledging that you are in that room and somehow it works. In the early days of VR, we were always chasing that feeling of “presence”, where a player is so totally immersed in a virtual world that they forget they are standing in their living room. With Mixed Reality, we are bringing this other world into our rooms and convincing you it is real, and when it works, it is even more exciting than our first steps into VR. To achieve this, we are using several clever tricks. Our portal rendering technique devised by our lead tech artist Trev Clift allows us to render physically plausible spaces outside freely placed windows. Our little helper BOT (short for Botanical Orbital Transporter) uses a 3d voxel grid for pathfinding and navigation. Thoughtful game play design ensures that nothing ever feels intrusive in your space. And lastly, the amazing music by Equip ties together all our plants and their dreams into one grand galactic orchestra.
MS: We wanted to make a game that can be enjoyed by anyone. It is a friendly story, told by some hardcore sci-fi nerds at heart. Important narrative beats are delivered via voiced characters, but for players that are interested in the deeper lore of our game, there are ways to scan and discover more information about the world. Once you have healed a plant, its dream can be accessed via the menu. There is also a fun way to queue up a dream sequence for someone else you want to introduce to mixed reality where all they need to do to enter the dream is to pop a floating bubble. This way, a player can easily share an amazing first Mixed Reality experience with friends and family, something we have geared our game towards from the beginning. We love MR and want to share it with as many people as we can and want to include anything to make that easier for players as well.
From an accessibility standpoint, we want every player to be able to play the game. We generally do not rely on any controller buttons other than the grip trigger to grab items. Hand tracking is also supported. All UI and interactive elements can be used with either controller/hand. Since objects are placed by players, they always appear at the “correct” height. We don’t disallow placement for most objects, so it is up to the individual player to determine where everything goes. In dreams, we scale and move dream elements to the height of the player, allowing smaller players to also experience everything the game has to offer. My young daughter loves playing the dreams! (As a reminder: Please refer to the Meta Quest safety information regarding childrens’ use: https://www.meta.com/au/quest/parent-info/ )
MS: Join our Starship Home Discord! You can also find us on the game’s X/Twitter account, the studio’s X/Twitter, as well as the studio’s Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. And like any hip 90s kid, we have a newsletter on our website as well.
