With just getting started, the first 2 Creator Challenges I participated in were really helpful.
The first by SeeingBlue focused on simply modifying and publishing a largely pre-existing world was a great introduction to Desktop Editor. It really highlighted what (in my opinion) is the true strength of the platform: the ability to quickly and easily publish to desktop / mobile / and VR.
The second one by SpaceGlitterUnicorn was really helpful for understanding the workflow, requirements, and limitations of importing assets from Blender. The example assets that were provided made the process much easier to get through; and once I had gone through it once it was way easier to plan what I needed to do for future assets.
While working through those Challenges I also started to download and dissect all of the Example Worlds. These were super helpful for being able to understand how to work with Typescript, and to learn the patterns for how to organize objects within projects.
As I found parts of the Example Worlds I was considering doing something with, I began to bring them back into the World I had created for the first Challenge. This ultimately turned that world into one giant sandbox of unrelated stuff, but my driving principle was: If I could get a mechanic working there I’d be able to use that mechanic in any other World I create in the future.
At this point in my ramp up I was spending a lot of time on the “Learn” and “API reference” tabs of https://developers.meta.com/horizon-worlds.
One of the other benefits of taking this approach was that it started to give me a better sense of what the limitations of the platform were. Those would be the things that I would need to develop a custom solution for (like the grabbing mechanic in Puzzle Rush), or would outright simply avoid doing entirely.
From that point on I built a new World that would serve as the preproduction for Puzzle Rush, where I would mostly implement (and re-implement!) the core mechanics of the game until they started to feel good.
Then I cloned that World into the current version of Puzzle Rush that exists today; cleaned up the scripts; did one final reorganization of how they were structured; and then started adding in all of the features. All while consistently playtesting and polishing along the way.
