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Galactic Traffic Control In partnership with flowanimation.com

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So far: - Surfacebound Pathing -Surface Snapping - Surface Queries (Get surface of label X and type Z, or GetSpawnInRoom) - Surface Zones (configure "valid" surface areas) - Configurable Surface Grids (using this to smooth out pathing rn) Want to add oct-trees next for better performance & pathing!

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But for now, here's the path that's represented by the nodes in the first post. You can see that it goes Wall11 -> Floor -> Table2Right -> Table2Top and the corresponding nodes are highlighted in gold in both the 2D and 3D view

Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 28/07/2025

I'm continuing work on our OpenXR mixed reality tool called "MR Magic" Here's a screenshot of what that looks like with meta bounding boxes in my room + the tool I made to help me visually debug my surface2surface pathfinding algo Surfaces are nodes connected by edges, which is what's shown :)

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While I'm working on the new game my team is working on finishing up Galactic Traffic Control with a 1.0 official release! Plus! Doing some very cool collaborations. Very excited with where we're going and what we're doing.

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 02/05/2025

VR + Mini Mode update is out NOW for Galactic Traffic Control! I ❤️ this update. You can play while seated, standing still, on a unicycle, wherever! I like mini-mode even better than room-scale. We also added VR Mode. Quest 2 users, rejoice! Try it! Lmk ur thoughts www.meta.com/experiences/...

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 31/03/2025

For the past week I've been working on a surface-bound pathfinding package in Unity for mixed reality apps. I'm hoping to release it for other devs to use as well once I have it a bit more polished up! Spoilers -- we're in the early days of a tower defense prototype for our next game 👀

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 18/03/2025

Demoing Galactic Traffic Control today at Yerba Buena Garden with @ellenlowing.bsky.social from 1pm to 4pm ish Pop by if you're at #GDC

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 17/03/2025

Was awesome seeing the legendary @tripmaster.bsky.social in GDC! I'll be around to meet with any other XR folks this week so hit me up!!

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 20/02/2025

Hello everyone! I'm excited to share that I'll be going to GDC for the first time this year!! I'm looking to connect with anyone in the XR community. Would really love to chat. Reach out if you're want to meet up at some point for coffee or a chat ☕🍵

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 21/12/2024

Working on a new banner for Galactic Traffic Control! What do y'all think? New (left) vs Old (right)

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 11/12/2024

I know on Meta's *only* discontinuing Scoreboard and that technically Leaderboard still works. Ideally, they're going to re-build the scoreboard functionality into the OS and all the other associated APIs will keep working as normal. Just worried about implementing bc of this. Any tips / advice??

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To make it even more tricky, I made it so that if a buff did spawn, you had to collect it just like a hyperdrop if you wanted to claim it! Except with one big twist: unlike hyperdrops, the buffs move around the station. So they're a bit tricky to catch

Screenshot of a buff being delivered by a ship in Galactic Traffic Control

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Originally they were just meant to be used on buffs you could spawn from a menu on your hand. Each had a cost, so you could only buy what you could afford. They're still used to buy buffs (& game modes now too!) but what's really changed is how I handle buffs!

Screenshot of my old Hyperdrop Shop / Buff Store / Main Menu in Galactic Traffic Control. A bit of a mess right?

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Hyperdrops! The idea with hyperdrops is that they serve as a currency that allows you to get power-ups / buffs. To collect them, rather than have the user just pinch them quickly before disappearing, it was better to make the user have a ship collect and deliver them

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My final, and favorite, obstacle was the Cosmablob. I am fond of this guy for his funky blob physics and googly eyes. The blob has two special properties: 1. They absorb the power of any ships they overlap with & leave them frozen for 30s. 2. They attack either you / the station

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The benefit of the blackhole is that in addition to being a spatial threat, they're a temporal threat, too. The player can try to navigate around the blackhole (spatial), but they also have to decide whether to stay around the blackhole for its duration in order to prevent 💥

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Blackholes were another obvious addition and immediately menacing. They have a gravitational pull, but rather than immediately absorbing ships they would act like fly-traps, holding onto a ship until another ship gets pulled in and they 💥 This also allows player to save them!

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I began with asteroids. Asteroids were straightforward: they spawn and flame towards the station, maybe taking out a ship or too on the way. If it hits? Minus one heart. While fun, it wasn't until later in the development cycle that I realized I could make them more threatening

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Well, him, & a few other threats. So far GTC was a great spatial management game — but Flight Control was also a time management game according to Wikipedia. I needed to make sure the player had to make choices about what to pay attention to. I needed obstacles & opps.

Screenshot of Flight Control's Wikipedia entry

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This is good! Very good, in fact, and an improvement on the helicopter vs plane of Flight Control that makes it more suitable for 3D. Yet I didn't feel like there was enough tension in the gameplay still. It needed more. How could I make the game feel a tad bit more chaotic? Him

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Red 🟥 ships are small, annoying, aggressive, and relentless. They're a lot like mosquitoes, and while they're like green ships in that they seek you out for answers, they just get angrier if you try to nudge them away. You have to drag them off your face and right to the portal

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Purple 🟪 ships are my favorite. They're just as confused as blue ships, but more jumpy! They zip around your room randomly really really fast. Like they've got the zoomies. They rest for a few seconds between sprints, but you can only catch them while they're moving.

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Orange 🟧 ships are massive and slow, maybe cargo ships, but this is business as usual for them. No star-sickness in sight. They go straight for their portals just like in Flight Control! But watch out, they might crash into smaller ships on their linear path forward.

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Green🟩ships aren't dumb — just disoriented from hyperjumping. Also common! They're smart enough to recognize you as the Galactic Traffic Controller. So, when they appear, they'll go straight to your face until you guide them or give 'em a nudge. They figure it out from there.

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Let's tour the ships! Our most common ship is Blue🟦 These guys are a little dumb. They don't know where to go at all, adrift in hyperspace, & need you to guide them all the way to their portal. Otherwise, they'll bumble around your space randomly until 💥

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As you can see in the hero banner, I've got blue, green, orange, purple, & red ships! Each with not only different movement speeds, but different sizes, movement patterns, and most importantly, different behaviors. Only orange ships go straight for their portal.

Galactic Traffic Control's hero banner featuring all different ship colors, some asteroids, a blackhole, and a cosmablob

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Altho the end goal is still getting ships into the port in the "center" of your room (inward flow) the ships DON'T go toward their ports on their own. Why? FC works bc you can see the whole map. It's 2D so you have total oversight & the screen is small — collision is guaranteed

Diagram depicting the inward flow of the game

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Because all planes and helicopters in the game move towards the airport unless otherwise directed, the energy is very centralized. You need to be able to reroute away from or towards the center quickly & correctly in order to avoid collisions. GTC is similar, but w/ 1 difference

Screenshot of Flight Control annotated to depict the "inward-flowing" nature of the game

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I want to talk about the energy of the games first! Originally, I only had 1 ship type in GTC ! FC actually has 2, planes and helicopters, but they have the same logic, just with different movement speeds. Otherwise, they behave the same.

Screenshot of Flight Control with an annotation highlighting the planes and the helicopter

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 03/12/2024

🧵Gameplay Design Decisions for My Mixed Reality Game! As promised yesterday, a sort of continuation of my GTC story but with a gameplay design lens. This is my first thread on this topic, at which I am a beginner, so let's see. How did I adapt my take on Flight Control to 3D?

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And bc of this self-doubt, I lost at least one month of development time. It wasn't until late May / early June that I came to the obvious conclusion: What GTC truly needed was for me to double down on arcade mode. To make it shine. And to offer different *types* of arcade modes. Not a campaign!

screenshot of my version control changesets. There was nearly a one month gap between changesets 74 and 75

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At that point, I tweeted about the game and my progress, but in an off-hand way. It was a fun experiment and it would be fine enough to publish for free and leave it at that. Silly me. Needless to say, that was only the beginning of the development cycle. I spent the next 9 months working on GTC

Twitter screenshot of Juan announcing his prototype back in February 6th of 2024

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And soon after that, I had a functional prototype! It had some simple progression logic, different ship colors with different behaviors (more on that later), hand tracking and controller support, and of course instead of an airport in the middle of your screen, I had a big old spaceport in your room

Instead of using the edges of the screen to spawn planes, I used the walls of the playspace. Instead of planes, I used spaceships. Instead of touch & drag, I used pinch & drag. Instead of 2 dimensions, GTC plays on 3 dimensions. But the core game loop is the same! A week later, I had a start!

Out of holiday season nostalgia, and because I was looking for inspiration, I turned to some of my favorite mobile games. Games that were simple, but took unique advantage of the touchscreen. The moment I started playing Flight Control, I knew what I wanted to build: Galactic Traffic Control!

gameplay screenshot of Galactic Traffic Control featuring ships following the routes to their portals

... or with one of the various clones of it that popped up, like "Air Traffic Control" which is on CoolMathGames. Flight Control is a simple game. Planes come out from the edges of your screen. You must land them by drawing a path, & while you're at it, don't crash. In other words a perfect game!

Screenshot of the air traffic control game on cool math games

🧵 How I Made my Mixed Reality Game I wanted to make a thread about what inspired Galactic Traffic Control and some of the design decisions I made when creating the game! Would love to see more devs do this so I'll start first! It all started with me playing Flight Control ✈️ in December 2023

Flight Control banner featuring an iPhone playing the game and the IOS icon

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Juan Lam @juanlam.com · 01/12/2024

Best part of GTC is destroying asteroids on my cat 😈

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Woohoo!! And yes I believe that's the game that really inspired to me make GTC. I was playing it out of nostalgia last year and it struck me the design was really well suited for mixed reality so I built this game!! It's coming out really really soon and I hope you enjoy it :)

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# POWER-UPS And in case all that sounds a little bit tricky, don't worry, by collecting hyperdrops you can unlock power-ups that can spawn during gameplay 💗Health 🛡️Shield ⏳Time Shift 🖐️Ghost Hands 🎣Distance Grab ➕Bonus Portal

# DIFFICULTIES GTC has 3 (3️⃣) difficulty levels per game mode! 1. Normal: Just your regular day working the Galactic Highway. 2. Zen: Take it easy! 10 lives, no asteroids, blobs, blackholes or hyperdrops to worry about. 3. Xtreme: It's going to be a rough day at work.

4. Blackhole Mode Due to catastrophic technical difficulties, a blackhole has consumed your station. There's still traffic to route, though, so best get on with it and mind the gravity.

3. One Portal Mode Because of a clerical error, your station has been replaced with just one portal. You'll be fine, you just have to be a little extra careful when routing ships!

2. Wall Mode Budget cuts have hit the Department of Intergalactic Transportation, which means you'll have to make do with just your walls, furniture, floor, and ceiling! (This is my favorite!)

# GAME MODES GTC launches with FOUR (4️⃣) unique game modes to spice up gameplay 1. Classic Mode Route the ships coming from your walls to their portals on the Spaceport in the middle of your room!