Halfbrick Studios' Fruit Ninja was developed for iPhone in 2010 and has since become one of the most well-known mobile games, and developer Halfbrick today shared details on how to customize the game for Apple Vision Pro. Samantha Turner, lead game programmer at Halfbrick Studios, said in a brief released by Apple that games on Vision Pro have the potential to "do something very special."
To develop the game, the team worked hard to bring traditional 2D interfaces into 3D space. "We were flooded with ideas: What if players could squeeze juice out of an orange? What if they could tear open a watermelon and have the juice all over tables and walls?" she said. "Halfbrick had to figure out how to shoot fruit at people, and ultimately decided to set up a set of cannons in the virtual space."
How to interact with the fruit was also a question, and although Halfbrick tried various hand movements and weapons, he ultimately chose hands, with chopping fruit by hand being the most satisfying interactive experience.
"We always knew that the hands were going to be the center of the experience. We wanted players to be able to grab things and knock them away," she said. "We could also adjust the curvature of the fruit to make sure it was a comfortable fruit-slicing experience—in fact, we used the vertical position of the device itself to make sure we weren't throwing the fruit over our heads or too low."
Users will be able to slice and dice pineapples and watermelons by poking them, fire bombs by pushing them against far walls, and fire shurikens at fruit by swiping their palms outward.
"Super Fruit Ninja" is just one game on VisionPro. The headset will also support more than 250 Apple Arcade games at launch, some of which have been customized for spatial experiences. Other options include GameRoom and WhattheGolf, as well as other games being developed by third-party developers.
Gaming will be one of the VisionPro headset's primary functions, but the device will also support a number of productivity and entertainment apps. Slack, Microsoft365, Fantastical, JigSpace, Disney+ and Max are just some of the custom apps that will be available when VisionPro launches.
Pre-orders for VisionPro begin tomorrow, January 19th, at 5:00 AM Pacific Time. The launch event will take place on Friday, February 2nd.