I came up with this project in the shower. It wasn’t much, but it was the first full game I put together, and it only took me around 3 hours. The idea was simple, the player is a cowboy, riding horseback and can shoot the targets as the horse rides into the sunset.

The first steps in this project was setting up a simple player, so I made a simple sphere for the players head, and then a little hat. When the player reached up they could pull the hat off their head, and then hold it in front of them, and if they let go of it, it would return to the top of their head. This was unnecessary, but it was neat.

So then I had a player, I knew that the player would need to shoot a gun, but I didn’t want the player to have to hold onto the gun, for fear they might drop it. So I simply disabled the animator on the right hand, and made the gun fit the hand. I then wrote the scripts so that the gun would fire a small, self-destructing projectile every time the player pulled the trigger.

Now, my initial plan was to allow the player to ride the horse around the map, using the two joysticks. However, I didn’t want to create a finite map and I felt that a stationary game would feel more arcade-like and infinite.

Thus, I decided to create a simple endless road from the players perspective. At the end of this road, cacti would be instantiated with a constant velocity so they would move toward the player and then be destroyed once they were past the player. In this situation the player would be standing still, but it would feel as though they were moving forward in the opposite direction the cacti were moving.

So everything was put together, the cacti moved and the player could shoot the gun, but now what would the player shoot at. So I designed some targets and placed them on either side of the road. Essentially they worked like the cacti, just more randomized.

After spending maybe an hour trying to figure out an easy system for actually allowing the user to hit the targets with their bullets, I put the project down for a year. After getting a distracted by many other projects, I had an epiphany and finally sat down to finish this project, adding a menu and end scene as well as sounds and lighting.

Here below is the complete demonstration of the working game as played in Unity, as it was better quality than building it and recording from inside the Oculus Quest.

While this project wasn’t anything special, I felt it taught me quite a few tools and I feel that if it gained popularity I could build on it later and build it into something deluxe.