Virtuwhale Reality: Building Crossy Road Castle for Apple Vision Pro
Behind the Scenes at Hipster Whale! Bringing Crossy Road Castle to Apple Vision Pro
We’re super excited to be launching our game Crossy Road Castle on Apple Vision Pro this week! We’re taking you behind the scenes with some of the Hipster Whales who have been bringing the game literally off of the screen and into three-dimensional space!
At Hipster Whale we’re known for Crossy Road and it’s been amazing to be able to bring that IP to life on new platforms and in new games like Crossy Road Castle.
Alice Newhouse is the 3D artist working on Crossy Road Castle. Rob Walkley is the CTO and Tomas Normand is our Design Engineer! And me, Katie Roots, I’m the one asking the questions, Marketing Manager at Hipster Whale!
Can you share a bit about what it’s like working at Hipster Whale and how you became involved in game development for Apple Vision Pro? How do you feel about bringing Crossy Road to new and innovative platforms?
Alice—Working at Hipster Whale is an awesome environment bustling with amazing people, ideas, and experimentation! Every day in the studio can bring a huge mix of problem-solving and crazy fun ideas as we're figuring out how to bring Crossy Road Castle to a fresh medium of interaction. Every day is cooler than the last when you get to see the solutions the team comes up with.
Rob—I absolutely adore working with my amazing team mates at Hipster Whale. Crossy Road is a game I have followed and loved since launch, and it’s been a real pleasure following the journey of Hipster Whale since its inception, and then joining the team in 2019. I love colorful, joyous, family friendly arcadey games, so Crossy Road ticks all the boxes for me as a franchise. Crossy Road Castle was also my first major project with Hipster Whale, so it’s very close to my heart.
I also love new technology, it’s one of the major reasons why I’ve loved working in games for over two decades; it’s forever advancing as an industry and continuously changing in exciting ways that can be hard to predict. Getting the opportunity to work on Apple Vision Pro is incredibly exciting; testing out all of its new features and seeing how we can use them to bring new experiences to our players.
What’s cool about bringing Crossy Road Castle to Apple Vision Pro?
Rob—Apple Vision Pro gives players the opportunity to experience the game in a new, dynamic, 3D environment. The game itself is presented as a giant portal into a 3D world, so you can see the world from a different perspective, quite literally! Enemies and players shoot out of the screen into your room too, which is quite something!
Take us behind the scenes of Crossy Road Castle on Apple Vision Pro. What was the most exciting aspect of developing the game for this platform?
Tomas—It’s an entirely new UX paradigm. Every type of interaction and viewpoint has to be challenged and reimagined. I did a ton of prototypes to see how interaction with a virtual mixed reality environment can work and what makes it feel intuitive. This is a platform where UX assumptions are never correct.
Alice N—Coming from an artist’s perspective, it’s been very fun to reimagine the game lobbies as a dioramic experience - and to remake them as (not only) the bustling hubs of activity they already are, but also as a pseudo peek-behind-the-curtain look into the Crossy character’s lives in some strange sort of way. There’s an endless charm to seeing the characters share the same physical space as you and jump around in their cute lil way!
Were there any interesting challenges while tailoring Crossy Road Castle for Apple Vision Pro?
Alice N—Working alongside new and emerging tech means we’ve reimagined the game multiple times over, all in their own unique ways. There was a time when everything was resting on clouds and the game played in a mini theatre :o!
Rob—There have been a lot of fun challenges in adapting Crossy Road Castle spatially; how we present the game in your living space. The first time we saw the Unihorse Tower in our office was really quite special. Even just looking around at the little park bench, with Chicken hopping around the garden, was genuinely beautiful. It’s really something that needs to be experienced.
Tomas—The way Apple Vision Pro renders its environment is completely different from how normal games render. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to actually present our game since there are a lot of smoke and mirrors [in our presentation of the game] that become very apparent when you are not looking at the game through a screen at a very specific angle.
Crossy Road Castle on Apple Vision Pro introduces some unique features. Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind these additions and how they enhance the gaming experience?
Rob—For the hand controls in particular, we really wanted to make something that felt as intuitive as we could, and make them simple and fun to play. Simply pretend you’re grabbing a joystick with one hand and use it as you would a joystick, and pinch to jump, it’s pretty magical!
Are there any hidden gems or surprises within Crossy Road Castle on Apple Vision Pro that players should be on the lookout for?
Alice N—Gamer hint: Take a look around the lobbies and you might run into something cool :]
What was it like working on the Art for the Apple Vision Pro Environment?
Alice N—There’s a lot of wiggle room to be creative with UI/ UX. The bounds of a phone or monitor screen are a safety net which game devs take for granted, and taking that away paves the way for a lot of interesting brainstorming. Embracing the marriage of game and physical space led to some really fun game moments—like the mega characters in the character select and the characters flying out of the screen when they take damage.
The art workflow wasn’t a case of working from scratch, but instead rethinking how the assets and gameplay elements can be presented to look best in a spatial environment. To pull back the curtain a bit, figuring out how big/ transparent/ far away the clouds could be a whole iteration cycle on its own!
Early Development Footage of Crossy Road Castle for Apple Vision Pro
How has the game community's feedback shaped the development of Crossy Road Castle on Apple Vision Pro?
Rob—We love that Crossy Road Castle is a family friendly cooperative multiplayer, and that the multiplayer aspect has resonated strongly with our players, so it was really important to make Apple Vision Pro version play seamlessly with all of your existing Apple devices. So as one person is playing on Apple Vision Pro, a friend can join in via their iOS device!
It’s our 10th anniversary this year and we have a bunch of exciting things ahead of us. We hope you enjoy hearing from some of us here at Hipster Whale! Connect with us on Social Media to keep up with what we’re working on! We’re active on discord, join us and the Crossy Road Crew here: https://discord.com/invite/crossyroadcentral
