Introducing ‘Decommissioned: A VR Social Deduction Showcase’
Your space station on Mars is on the brink of collapse. Will you and your fellow players be able to save the station from mandatory evacuation? Or are you a mole working to take it down?
The red planet awaits you in Decommissioned, a new showcase of social gameplay capabilities on the Meta Quest platform.
Social deduction games, like the massively successful Among Us VR by Schell Games, Innersloth, and Robot Teddy, are a stellar example of how social presence on Quest can unlock new gameplay opportunities. Decommissioned is an open source project designed to inspire and educate VR developers about how our library of capabilities can work together to deliver an optimized, engaging social experience. This social deduction game lets you play as a researcher on a Mars colony when the colony’s systems begin to fail. The app supports up to eight players as you and the rest of your crew must control the system’s stations by hand in order to keep it online—however, there are adversaries onboard as well—some of your teammates are secretly moles working against you! Be careful—there’s no voting out or getting rid of suspected moles, and if the researchers can’t keep the colony online for five days, it will be…Decommissioned.
If you’re ready to save your Mars colony from destruction, you can download Decommissioned today on App Lab—and if you’re looking to level up social engagement in your own apps, you can also find the entire Unity project source on GitHub, including some helpful Unity utilities.
Dive in below to learn more about how we used Meta Avatars, Interaction SDK, and more to enhance players’ experience in Decommissioned, and discover how you can level up social gameplay with simple solutions.
Social Gameplay
Decommissioned was designed to highlight social presence capabilities on the Meta Quest Platform. By using the Meta Avatars SDK and Oculus Spatializer, you can see and hear other players as if they’re in the same physical location. With Hand Tracking enabled, each player’s natural body language also gets communicated with more realistic physics and precision. If you’re playing on Meta Quest Pro, the headset’s eye and facial tracking capabilities will level up social presence even further for a more connected, immersive experience.
Communication is key, and the game mechanics of Decommissioned encourages players to focus on the social experience. Social deduction is a perfect genre for this—an entire phase of the game is dedicated just to discussion! Players are given the opportunity to interrogate each other, accuse each other, lie to each other, and just joke around.
When players aren’t chatting, they’ll take control of the five stations that keep the station operational in the form of five minigames. These minigames show different ways to use the Interaction SDK to create interesting gameplay, including interactions like punching asteroids, manipulating chemistry equipment, grabbing and throwing fuel cells, and aiming a hose. These interactions aren’t just fun, they feel incredibly natural—particularly when played using hand tracking.
Decommissioned makes you feel like you’re playing a game in-person with your colony mates—and it’s an experience you can use as a blueprint to replicate similar features in your own apps. It’s almost more like an in-person board game than an online video game—of course, in a board game you can’t shoot lasers at holographic asteroids. This enhanced degree of social presence is just one reason why Decommissioned and so many other games on the Meta Quest Platform enable gaming experiences that are only possible with VR.
Free and Open Source
Co-developed by Meta and Gravity Jack, Decommissioned illustrates features that can work together to deliver an engaging social experience with crisp visuals. Our Decommissioned repository on GitHub serves as a reference point for developers looking to build a Meta Quest game by documenting the use of capabilities like:
It also illustrates how to implement a multiplayer game using Unity Netcode for GameObjects, Photon Realtime, and Photon Voice 2.
But that’s not all—much of the project is being released under MIT License. That means you can freely use the code in your own projects. You could even fork the project and build a new game directly on top of it!
Helpful Unity Packages
Four Unity packages are included in our repository, including useful utilities for developing Unity projects like:
Meta Utilities: General utilities for game development, including an AutoSet attribute for optimized component references and the Network Settings Toolbar for quicker multiplayer testing.
Meta Input Utilities: Utilities related to XR input, including the XR FPS Simulator for rapid in-editor gameplay testing.
Watch Window: A new editor tool to help track and visualize data while in Play or Edit mode.
Play and Build for Social VR
We hope you enjoy this showcase of social gameplay on Meta Quest, and we encourage you to try out the game and explore the possibilities of social VR. We also encourage you to check out our previous showcases, including Ultimate Glove Ball, The World Beyond, and First Hand, to see more examples of social VR and Presence Platform capabilities in action.
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