App prototyping is an important part of the development process—one that can help you test the design, mechanics, and functionality of a new or existing idea. Your prototype represents a chance to take creative risks and see how concepts play out when put into practice. Feedback between developers fosters new and unique projects, but collaborating effectively on a prototype using game engines has its limitations.
Meta Horizon Worlds is a unique platform that has helped developers overcome these roadblocks, allowing them to prototype effectively with others without taking off their headset.
Horizon Worlds’ suite of creator tools was designed to help you build worlds quickly and easily, making it the perfect platform for VR prototyping. We spoke with team members at
ARVORE, creator of
Pixel Ripped, and learned how they’ve successfully leveraged Horizon Worlds to create prototypes that catalyzed their journey from 2D concept to finished product.
“Our teams are currently working on two large, not-yet-announced Quest 2 games, and both of them had their initial prototyping phases done within Horizon Worlds,” says ARVORE CEO and Co-Founder Ricardo Justus.
If you have an idea, mechanic, or design that you want to see in action, consider these insights that could improve the quality of your app.
Network & Collaborate With Other Developers
One of the most powerful aspects of Horizon Worlds is its ease of collaboration. You can communicate ideas in real time using your avatars, bringing a greater sense of presence and familiarity as you build your prototype. Jump into your prototype with your team or testers to get immediate feedback—it’s like you’re in the same room together.
“We were trying to explain our design ideas to the team remotely using 2D concepts and sketches, but they weren't seeing it. By creating it in Horizon Worlds, they could see and understand them,” says ARVORE Creative Researcher Flora Fróes. “We can move and change things collaboratively while in a meeting and add their inputs and ideas with ours.”
Collaboration leads to better innovation and creativity, and we want to foster an environment where you can network with other developers in the community to expand and share your ideas. You can quickly give access to other builders or colleagues in the World Details page and walk through your prototype together—even if you’re miles apart. If a team member is busy, you can use voice commands to take screenshots or record a video for later use.
Team members at ARVORE collaborating in Horizon Worlds.
Prototyping with Horizon Worlds is effective because it allows for input on both creative and technical aspects of your app. This provides value to team members with different objectives, depending on their role.
While working in Horizon Worlds, ARVORE Senior Concept Artist Aluísio Cervelle Santos has been able to take environment designs from his 2D concept and quickly experience how they feel in VR.
“I have used Horizon Worlds often as a quick sketching tool in order to try out the Spatial elements in Environment Concept Art, such as object and layout distances, fog, and atmosphere, as well as parallax tricks which can later be translated into more complete studies in Blender or full-fledged projects in Unity,” Santos notes.
2D concept design from ARVORE.
While an app’s design may catch people’s attention initially, prototyping the mechanics of an app is equally as important for retaining engagement. For ARVORE Creative Director Ana Ribeiro, Horizon Worlds has been particularly useful in the ideation phase, allowing her to test ideas for the macrostructure in order to discover a game’s core loop and core mechanics.
“This will be our third game in the Pixel Ripped series, and it was the first time we started the project literally inside VR. It turned out to be the best way for the initial creative process to flow,” says Ribeiro.
Horizon Worlds offers creative value by allowing you to embrace risk without fear of failure. The sandbox nature of creating in Horizon Worlds helps you leverage your imagination to build publishable projects and gather feedback with fewer barriers to distribution than App Lab or the Meta Quest Store. Experimenting with mechanics or designs using real audiences can indicate how people might respond to your idea on a mass scale—or it may take on a life of its own within Horizon World’s growing community. To get the most creative benefits from your prototype, ARVORE Associate Creative Director Rodrigo Blanco suggests using your Horizon Worlds project like a scratch sheet for internal collaboration.
“Treat Horizon Worlds like a sketchbook,” says Blanco. “Do not get attached to the project—it shouldn’t be an objective for other Horizon Worlds users to understand it. Always remember that the work that you do in Horizon Worlds should be for you (or any other members of your team) to get a better idea of how to plan the next steps of your project.”
Features like the snapping tool allow you to easily use your thumbstick to align objects in your “sketchbook” and manipulate assets on the fly as you expand upon your ideas. After you align your objects, you can quickly modify their dimensions or use the paint tool to drag through multiple items and add color. These features help put your imagination into practice and let your creativity flow uninterrupted.
Testing multiple iterations of an idea can help you fine tune your concept while expanding your creative boundaries to create something unique, exciting, and memorable.
Show, Don’t Tell: Overcome Key Challenges
Communicating VR ideas effectively, especially via virtual meetings or to those with minimal game engine experience, can be difficult. Horizon Worlds prototypes help you show your ideas to your team members, regardless of their experience level. As ARVORE Senior Concept Artist Vinicius Velo explains, Horizon Worlds can help portray gameplay in simple terms that can be expanded upon for your final project.
“We wanted to create a visual evolution of a 1-dimension world into a full 3D world throughout the path the player would take in order to complete the level, and that was a harder job to explain using the more conventional tools,” says Velo. “In Horizon Worlds, we got to create a prototype of the level for the game developers to understand and experience what we were trying to accomplish.”
Team members at ARVORE exploring a Horizon Worlds prototype.
Make the Most of Creator Tools
A prototype doesn’t need to take weeks of preparation. Horizon Worlds’ creator tools were designed to be intuitive to help you build and ship worlds quickly. As a creator, you can select pre-made objects, code blocks, and sounds to incorporate into your projects.
When building and collaborating, it’s likely that not everyone on your team will be well-versed in all aspects of development. Thankfully, Horizon Worlds has made building in 3D easy for collaborators from multiple disciplines to jump in and participate. “The interface is super intuitive, allowing anyone inside the team, even those with zero prior knowledge, to quickly start using the platform and collaborating creatively,” says Ribeiro.
This interface applies to all aspects of the platform, from objects to scripts to gizmos. Blanco reiterates that these intuitive features help you ensure your idea is conceptually sound before jumping ahead. “Being able to create in VR using building blocks of primitive shapes is an incredibly fast experience once you get used to it,” says Blanco. “Using primitives already forces you to think of more conceptual ideas instead of focusing on details prematurely. I really like using the gizmos while in VR. This coupled with the stamp tool is a powerful combination!”
The Asset Library in Horizon Worlds is your one-stop-shop for integrating physical objects into your prototype, including structures, terrain, props, and more. Using your Touch controllers, you can drag and drop objects into your world and modify their shape and size as you desire. The duplicate tool is especially valuable for quickly building out repeated objects within your world. Object scripts can also be tailored to fit your prototype’s use case according to the idea you have in mind, reducing build time.
We’re constantly updating and adding tools to help you build a more robust prototype for testing or distribution. The Dynamic Light Gizmo allows you to add moving, point, and spotlights that can be used in a variety of applications such as campfires, flashlights, and more.
Be sure to click on the “Learn” button in the Build Menu for more tutorials on the latest tools and features.
Save Time Building & Publishing Your Next Great Idea
We’ve streamlined development in Horizon Worlds to take place entirely in-headset. Our world-building tools provide everything you’ll need to make your prototype and test it without removing your device, minimizing disruptions to your creative process.
Building and testing prototypes in-headset has helped Santos alleviate common spacing and dimension problems that arise when using game engines to build prototypes before testing in-headset. “This rapid prototyping is a lot quicker than having to commit everything via regular methods to only then check that several proportions are off,” he says.
3D prototype environment created by ARVORE using Horizon Worlds.
With more time spent building and testing instead of switching between surfaces, you can streamline your prototyping process and improve productivity. “It's all about how quickly I can throw myself in the scene without having the usual setbacks of doing so in a game engine,” says Blanco. “Horizon lets me focus and collaborate on creative ideas without constantly getting distracted with switching from headset to a screen, or scaling/rotating/moving objects with a mouse and keyboard.”
Gather Feedback & Monetize: Publish Your World or Test with Colleagues
As a creator, you own all of the intellectual property rights for your prototype. Even if you build your prototype with the purpose of supporting the development of a VR app, publishing a polished world can draw in audiences and spur lasting engagement that leads to revenue.
We’re currently testing several new tools that will enable creators to experiment with different ways to monetize what they’re building in Horizon Worlds, and we’re working directly with creators to imagine new ways to earn money. We’re also working on a bonus program to reward creators who build unique and engaging worlds on the platform.
Published worlds are available for anyone to enter, so you can see how your concept is received by audiences with little to no background knowledge of your project. Feedback is crucial to the development process, and allowing as many people in Horizon Worlds to experience your world as possible can inform your app strategy. Friends can also search for your published prototype in the Places menu and help you identify elements that enhance or hinder your user experience.
Whether your idea is a theme, mini-game, or mechanic, your prototype can provide insight to evaluate how audiences will respond on a mass scale. One way to accomplish this effectively without publishing your world is to invite colleagues to jump in and test your prototype.
“We usually have more people from the company test out the prototypes and give immediate feedback, which helps us quickly make decisions before moving on to Unity or other tools to develop the actual game,” says Justus. “The time saved from quick iteration and testing helps a lot even if we can't transport what we built in Horizon Worlds back into the project directly.”
Translate Your Findings Into Your Game Engine
Once you’re finished building and testing your prototype, it’s time to translate your idea into your game engine. Your prototype provides a solid foundation for you to work from, so all that’s left is recreating the design or mechanic without the guesswork.
Santos explains how third-party apps can help expedite this process: “Through screenshots, prototype art can be recreated in detail via other apps such as Blender for more accurate concept art. Sometimes I can even use those screenshots as a base for matte painting—for example, if I already have a very solid idea in such worlds.”
If you’re considering prototyping or have already implemented prototyping in your workflow, Ribeiro advises using Horizon Worlds to attain a project that mimics the in-headset experience as closely as possible. “Building for VR has to be done inside VR,” she says. “There is no better way, because it improves the creative process, the communication between the team, and speeds up decision making. We are not there yet, but we hope that in the near future, VR will be the place to build and release all our projects from start to finish.”
For more information on creating in Horizon Worlds, check out our
FAQ. Already creating in Horizon Worlds? Check out our
YouTube page for in-depth tutorials.
