Gojek: Virtual Reality Shooting

  • ( Wave shooter )
  • ( Recruitment )
  • ( PC VR )

Gojek set up an engineering base in Bengaluru and needed to hire at scale while being effectively invisible to Indian engineers. No consumer operations here, no brand recognition, and a service catalogue (rides, food, payments, logistics) that means nothing to someone who has never opened the app. The wider campaign leaned into that with programming-joke billboards in airports and buses, cinema spots and a candid engineering blog. This was the piece you could actually play.

It's a wave shooter set in a dystopian cyberpunk Jakarta, full of Indonesian street signage and Gojek billboards. You enter your name, pick a weapon up off a crate, and hold the street against waves of troopers, drones and a walker while Gojek's services turn up to bail you out. The session is timed, and at the end a drone flies in carrying your score.

Holding the street: troopers down the avenue, the score anchored in the world beside the glowing Gojek mark, and GO-JEK signage on every wall.

Services as combat verbs

A super-app is a list, and a list is the least memorable thing you can hand an engineer at a career fair. So each service became a combat verb. GO-PAY is a token airdropped by a delivery drone when you need it. GO-CAR drives into the street and becomes the cover you fight from. GO-BOX turns up as logistics. You don't read the product range, you get rescued by it.

The city as the exposition

Rather than explaining the company, the world is saturated with it: food stalls, GO-FOOD signage, GO-PAY hoardings, drones in company livery. The set dressing does the explaining, and the Indonesian detail says this is a real business operating at scale somewhere you haven't been looking.

Ten seconds to teach a stranger

At an event you get one line of text before someone starts feeling foolish in front of a queue. The entire tutorial is "right trigger to pickup", attached to a gun lying within arm's reach. Everything after that is learned by doing.

The whole tutorial: a gun lying on a crate within arm's reach, and one line of text.

Comfort for a first headset

There's no free locomotion. You advance between staged cover positions, each one a grounded frame with something solid at waist height. It gives the sense of pushing through a level without the sliding movement that makes new players queasy.

Readability on the spectator screen

The score is anchored in the world next to a glowing Gojek mark, damage numbers are oversized, and an orange arrow points at threats you can't see. A novice can't parse a busy HUD, and thirty people are watching the whole thing on a flat monitor with no sound. The spectator screen is the real marketing surface, so we built the interface for it.

Name entry, timer, leaderboard

Name entry at the front and a timed, scored run at the back give you a leaderboard, a rivalry and a reason to queue again. That is what keeps an engineer standing at a booth long enough for a recruiter to talk to them, and what gets the thing talked about on campus afterwards. Even the score card arrives in-world on a drone, not as a menu.

Why it was built for tethered PC VR

For an audience being asked to take an unknown employer seriously, a rough experience would have done real damage. Building for tethered PC VR bought us dynamic lighting, volumetrics and detailed environments. Expensive at an event in cabling, floor space and staff, but the polish is the message.