
After the “success” of our first released game, Whack-em-All!, it was already late August. But we decided to release a “reskinned” version of the original game – for Halloween 🎃👀😱💀👻
Typical for newbie game designers, we had trouble keeping the scope and feature creep crept in and made us work hard to make it for the spooky season. But we managed to get the game out before Halloween! 💪🏻
You can grab the game for free for Oculus/Meta VR headsets from SideQuest: https://sidequestvr.com/app/2004/whack-em-all-halloween-edition
The new features included
- Ghosts as main enemies
- Creepy skeletons as variety of enemies. With ragdoll & breakable joints – if enough force applied
- Three new weapons
- Flashlight in secondary hand for illumination
- Three new levels with unique design
- New start menu level with skull xylophone and coffin levelstarter ⚰
- Tombstone name generator
- Whole new game mechanic: Ghosts & Skellies are stealing your pumpkins!

Especially the game mechanic of enemies to target, grab and run away with pumpkin loot was arduous thing to code. Lots of exception handling, such as other ghost picking up your targeted loot before you, returning of grabbed but dropped pumpkin (by killing the culprit) or level ending condition checking…. Good preschool for future games fo sho! ⭐
Other important lessons learned was that polishing can take forever – unless you settle on an acceptable level. And tiny details you want to add might be way more laborious than initially thought.. And that darn feature creep! Also, this was the first time we kinda found out the limitations of mobile GPU in a standalone VR headset such as original Oculus Quest. All post-processing effect to make the ghosts cool looking were off the table! 🔥
Videos from the Halloween Edition
Picture Gallery








