May 15, 2025

Creator Spotlight: How Habitor Built a World in 5.5 Hours with GenAI

Meet Habitor, a professional Worlds creator with five years of experience on the Horizon platform, the founder of HabitXr and the mind behind beloved worlds like Plants! and Bugs!

One day after we announced our GenAI creator tools, Habitor took on a personal challenge: build an entire playable world using GenAI in just one afternoon.

The result? Suitcase Scramble—a complete, functional world built from scratch in 5.5 hours. We had the chance to chat with Habitor to learn more about the inspiration behind Suitcase Scramble and discover how our new GenAI tools helped bring his imagination to life.

The entire Suitcase Scramble experience was built in 5.5 hours using new GenAI tools like Mesh Generation and Skybox Generation.

A Game Born of Chaos

The inspiration for Suitcase Scramble came from a moment of real-world frustration: Habitor’s luggage had gone missing at the San Francisco airport as he arrived for GDC 2025. Reflecting on this luggage fiasco, he turned an experience that most of us would be complaining about weeks later into a playful premise: what if sorting bags under pressure was a game? That kernel of truth gave the project its heart—and its humor.

Setting the Challenge

Inspired by Meta’s GDC demo that demonstrated how GenAI tools could build a pirate-themed world in under six hours, Habitor set out with clear ground rules and parameters:

Scope smartly: No sprawling RPGs—one simple, repeatable mini-game with leaderboards.

Divide the labor: What assets would GenAI create? What would he build manually?

Prioritize speed: “Good enough” was the goal; perfection could wait.

Armed with nothing but a concept and his personal experience, he set to work.

Building Suitcase Scramble

Suitcase Scramble tasks players with sorting luggage into bins as conveyor belts speed up. Miss three times, and it's game over. But, how do you build an entire environment, assets and gameplay logic this fast?

In Suitcase Scramble, players sort luggage along a conveyor belt as it progressively increases speed to level up difficulty.

The GenAI Advantage:

Habitor categorized his needs into three asset buckets:

Key gameplay assets: Suitcases, bins, conveyor belts and buttons.

Environmental assets: Floor tiles, wall panels, doors and carpets.

Decorative assets: Potted plants, airplane props and even a penguin for flair.

He leaned heavily on Mesh Generation AI, creating dozens of objects in minutes that would have traditionally taken hours. Along the way he relied on some clever tricks:

Reuse and repurpose: A flattened suitcase mesh became signage.

Cover imperfections: In the instance that a GenAI asset wasn’t perfect, it was covered up with another asset.

Simple and smart: When necessary, Habitor used basic primitive shapes that were tinted appropriately, rather than wasting time perfecting prompts.

Habitor even used external GenAI tools lightly, like generating a fake airline logo and stylizing a thumbnail for the game. To save time producing sound, he dipped into the Worlds desktop editor’s native stock library.

Habitor leveraged external GenAI tools to round out his process by creating artwork and logos almost instantaneously

Habitor’s Key Learnings

Along the way, Habitor noted some valuable insights that can help other creators save additional time and refine their approach:

GenAI is a tool—not a replacement. Habitor emphasized that 5.5 hours of creation was only possible because of his five years of experience building in Horizon. GenAI accelerated asset creation, but building a functional world still required a creator's instincts to pull it all together.

Mesh GenAI shines with broad objects (like airplanes), but requires extra tweaking when it comes to complex mechanical objects like TSA X-ray machines.

The AI-generated skybox was a standout, setting the perfect mood with minimal effort.

While Suitcase Scramble is fully playable, Habitor considers it a prototype with room for artistic refinement, coding improvements and unexpected bugs (like what happens if you go AFK).

In leveraging GenAI to accomplish a variety of tasks, this experience fundamentally shifted Habitor’s view. The world creator now firmly believes that AI has a place in professional workflows, especially for early prototyping, concepting and injecting some creative fun.

Why This Matters

When we first launched our GenAI tools, we knew that they would be game-changers for world creators, but Habitor’s experiment proved exactly what we hoped: GenAI tools empower creators to move faster than ever before, turning hours into minutes, imagination into action and concepts into playable worlds at an unprecedented speed. Suitcase Scramble isn’t just a technical success, it’s a statement: With the right tools, great creators don’t have to wait to bring their ideas to life.

In Habitor’s own words: “Fast practices, not best practices—but it’s playable, it’s fun and it exists. And that’s magic.” To start building with GenAI, download the Worlds desktop editor. For the latest creator tips, updates and opportunities, be sure to follow us on X and Facebook and subscribe to our monthly newsletter in your Developer Dashboard settings.

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