State of Voice Moderation

The State of Voice Moderation

We've received a lot of questions about voice moderation, so we got the 411 from our trust and safety team on how voice moderation actually works in Rec Room.

We use voice moderation systems in all public rooms in real time. These are cutting-edge machine learning systems that detect hate, harassment, and other types of nasty speech based on Rec Room’s community standards.

What’s The Deal?

We’ve spent the last year running analyses and reworking our systems. Here’s the most important takeaway: the data confirms what we knew all along - the vast majority of players are fantastic community members. Most have never broken the Code of Conduct. Never. Not once. Angels.

Of those that have broken the rules, most players only slip up once. Say it gets a bit tense, maybe you miss *that* paintball shot at the last second and a few “$%@!s” slip out - our voice moderation system is designed for exactly this. It will catch the one-off and give you a friendly warning - because we get it - we all get caught up in the moment from time to time.

What If It’s Not Just A Moment Then?

Players only lose mic privileges if that moment escalates. Temporarily revoking mic privileges is a very direct form of feedback - hey, that wasn't cool! - but it’s also a chance to reflect; "how can I be excellent with other Rec Roomers when I get my mic back?"

If a player keeps using speech to be hateful or harass, that mic restriction will increase, and may eventually turn into a ban to give them a chance to cool off. We don’t like banning players. We do it when we have no other way to protect the experience for the rest of our community.

As we said, our players are top notch. So, bans for voice chat toxicity are actually really rare- like 1 in 135,000 people rare. You’re literally more likely to roll all sixes on six dice! And those very rare bans are now also short - we don’t need to (and we aren’t) pressing the 40-year ban button or even the one week ban button for voice toxicity. Long or permanent bans are used only for serious code of conduct violations.

But What If I Didn’t Actually Mess Up?!

Hang on though… you’ve all seen the social posts that say “I didn’t say anything and then I got banned” or one of our favorites “It was just a mic echo”. But it’s not true! If players are getting banned or muted, we are pretty dang sure they said a few things they shouldn’t have. Is it 100% perfect? No. But it almost is…

This is where our internal data wizards - come in: every detection system has a False Discovery Rate (FDR) i.e. a chance of being wrong. The FDR limits the confidence we’re making the right decision on any issue. If the FDR is ever above 5%, you can never reach 99% confidence. Unless… you wait. If you see not 1, but 2 or 3, or even 25 potential-rule-breaks in any given period - then you can have quite a bit more confidence that someone did cross the line.

So even if the system has a 5% FDR, if we see a player caught 10x, then we’re not 95% confident - we’re more like 99.999999999% confident. So yeah…almost 100% perfect! We don’t want to interrupt games unnecessarily, so to reduce false positives, we don’t ban or mute based on one thing a player says in one fragment of speech - instead we wait until we hit that 99.999999999% confidence rating based on multiple hits, which can be over a few sessions or in the moment.

This really is the best of both worlds - we catch the worst toxicity, we forgive the one-offs, and we stop those gnarly false positives. And you know what? It works! This chart shows what’s been going on over the last year - instances of toxic voice chat have fallen by around 70%!

What’s Next??

So, job done then? Not quite…we’re getting to a good place on improving the systems’ accuracy, but accuracy is only half the story. The other half is about what we catch - and more importantly, what we don’t. Right now, if the system is catching you, you slipped up more than a few times. But we know - and you know - that there are times we probably should have caught something and we didn’t. Players being unfairly banned is lose-lose, so we worked on accuracy - but now we’re turning our attention to broader coverage. More on that in future updates, but for now, thank you to all of you who continue to make Rec Room the great community we want it to be. And keep doing your Rec Room Best!

Fractura - A Research Project: Exploring Generative AI in Rec Room Creation

Introduction

Fractura is a room where we explored extensive use of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in the Rec Room creation workflow.

The result was the creation of an immersive alien world brimming with ancient mysteries!

Rec Room’s in-house Creative Team took a broad and experimental approach, evaluating over 20 different GenAI tools to identify which had the most potential to benefit Rec Room’s creative community. Since Rec Room Studio is built on top of Unity 3D, all of the GenAI tools mentioned in this doc and others can be used by any Rec Room creator today.

Concept Phase

The use of GenAI started in the concept phase - the team used ChatGPT to develop the ideas behind Fractura, iterating through many prompts. The team explored ideas for landscapes, flora, and lore to flesh out the concept.

These ideas were then visualized using Midjourney and Dall-E. Fed by the text output of ChatGPT, these AI image generators created striking visual concepts.

This process was iterative, with the team using each round as inspiration to refine the ideas and shape Fractura’s identity and aesthetic.

If you want to see “behind the scenes”, here are detailed logs of what the concepting phase looked like:

ChatGPT Prompt Log

Midjourney and Dal-E Generated Concepts

Skyboxes

In video games, a “skybox” is an immersive texture that makes the environment seem larger than it really is. Creating convincing skyboxes is a difficult task that requires artists to create tricky “spherical” textures.

For Fractura, the team used Skybox AI by Blockade Labs. Skybox AI allowed the team to quickly generate skyboxes with the right kind of ethereal ambiance by entering text prompts based on the output of the concept phase.

The ease of generation allowed the team to create multiple skyboxes that players can choose from dynamically in the world of Fractura.

3D Asset Generation

GenAI was also used to generate 3D assets. Tools like CSM, Shap-E, and others had pros and cons. These tools were used to create trees, ancient stone robots, floating land masses, and distant buildings, instilling Fractura with an otherworldly allure.

However, optimization and performance challenges were commonplace. The assets generated often had very high polygon counts, requiring manual simplification and optimization so they could be used successfully in Rec Room Studio. Generation times were also often quite lengthy.

Despite some challenges, the future for 3D GenAI looks bright, and the team looks forward to further explorations!

Texture Creation and Soundscape

The team used Withpoly.com for texture creation and MusicGen for the soundscape.

Withpoly.com facilitated the rapid generation of textures and normal maps, allowing the team to integrate detailed textures into the game's environment and architectural elements. Since it was quick and easy to iterate on textures and normal maps, the team found they could use this tool to get just the kind of “otherworldly allure” they were going for.

When it came to the soundscape, MusicGen really delivered. This AI-powered music generator helped create a soundscape tailored to Fractura's alien landscape. The tool's ability to synthesize otherworldly tones, evocative melodies, and ambient soundscapes helped instill Fractura with captivating and immersive audio.

Want to listen to Fractura’s soundscape? Fractura’s Soundscape

Ideation and Interactive Elements

ChatGPT, Midjourney, and CSM helped the team create interactive experiences within the alien landscape. The incorporation of AI-generated components led to the development activities, such as a target shooting game and an interactive fire spirit. 

While these interactive elements weren’t generated “whole cloth” by GenAI tools, the GenAI applications made the creative process more efficient and enabled a smooth flow from conceptualizing ideas to implementing tangible in-game elements.

Envisioning the Future of GenAI

The final exploration zone, named the Holodeck, symbolizes the future potential of GenAI! Using the GenAI tools from Blockade Labs, the team created an experience where players can choose from a variety of generated 3D environments - a glimpse of the future where immersive 3D environments can be generated on the fly in response to player input.

Conclusion

Fractura is a milestone in Rec Room’s exploration of GenAI, highlighting both its transformative potential and the challenges in integrating it. Fractura exemplifies how Rec Room creators can leverage GenAI and Rec Room Studio to iterate and craft engaging rooms efficiently based on their imagination, creativity, and vision.

Custom Melee Weapons

When concepting Make it to Midnight, one of our main focuses was asking “What can’t creators easily do?”, and using that to guide our thinking for new mechanics in an RRO. We’ve already talked about how this led to Data Tables and Room Progression, but another concept we wanted to facilitate creation for was custom melee weapons - and that means something creators have been asking for for a long time now - Go-karts! Uhh, no wait, a Swing Handle! This means no more clamping shapes to swords just to get a good cross-platform experience! 

You’ve probably already seen the Swing handle through Bonky’s hammer in Make it to Midnight. And to  make this hammer feel the best it can, we had to make a few other components too so that creators can make RRO-quality custom melee weapons. 

Specifically, the new CV2 features that went in to making custom melee weapons a reality were:

• Swing Handle

• Collision Detection Volume

• Motion Trail

• New velocity chips

• Handle haptics

Emulating an RRO Weapon

One of our core goals with custom melee weapons was that creators would be able to easily hook up our components to create something that feels as good as, if not better than, our existing RRO melee weapons. To help with this, we broke down everything existing RRO weapons could do (the list was surprisingly long), and capture that behavior in a completely customizable way. This resulted in three core components - the Swing Handle, the Collision Detection Volume, and the Motion Trail. 

With these components, you can set up your own custom melee weapon as simply as this: 

This default setup will behave just like an RRO melee weapon and will have a good default impulse for hitting players and objects. If you want to try it out for yourself, just copy the above screenshot and have fun!

If you want to know more about the individual components, the Motion Trail component has been out for a while already, so let’s dive into the new Swing Handle and Collision Detection Volume.

Swing Handle

The Swing Handle, like our RRO swords, detects swings by clicking for screens players and by physical motion for VR players. The swing for screens players supports all of the animations from our existing RRO weapons, as well as a new animation, “Pickaxe,” that we hope players will find useful.

Charged attacks for screens players work on Swing Handles, however unlike RRO weapons they no longer move the player forward. If you want to add something like that functionality back, once we ship custom locomotion you’ll be able to apply velocity to the player when they start a swing.

Swing Handle - Aim Assist

One new exclusive feature of the Swing Handle is Aim Assist for Gamepad and Touch players, which is enabled by default. In order for creators to be able to use the Swing Handle to build high quality PvP games with melee weapons, we wanted to make sure that players on all platforms were able to easily chase and target other players when holding the Swing Handle.

This was an issue we ran into while initially implementing Bonky’s hammer in Make it to Midnight. Before we decided to add aim assist, it was very hard to hit other players on mobile. To remedy that, we reused and retuned our existing Aim Assist for RRO ranged weapons to support melee aim assist for the Swing Handle too. Before the Swing Handle leaves beta, creators will be able to customize who these features target.

Collision Detection Volume

Another important consideration for melee weapons was that melee hits should feel fun and realistic, both against players and objects. The first step of that was detecting collisions accurately, and what we had at the time, Trigger Volume, wasn’t very good for this purpose.

Trigger Volumes aren’t as reliable when they’re moving, and they don’t provide as much useful data on what they hit. This led us to creating the Collision Detection Volume, a new component that uses a series of spherecasts to detect collisions and provide meaningful data. This is why when you spawn the component in-game, you’ll see a capsule with several spheres inside of it - the spheres are what actually detect collisions.

Placing a Collision Detection Volume Component

When you first place down the Collision Detection Volume component, it might feel a bit weird. We recommend turning on the Show Selection Bounds makerpen setting when placing a Collision Detection Volume component if you have it turned off, as it will help you understand how the placement works.

We have lots of props that scale uniformly, like our existing melee weapons, and we have other components that are deformable, meaning they can scale along a singular direction, like the trigger volume for example. Because it has to be a uniform capsule, the Collision Detection Volume component is the first of its kind that is semi-deformable. As a capsule, scaling along the X or Z axis will scale both axes uniformly because it’s scaling the radius. The height can be scaled separately from the radius.

Due to performance reasons and maintaining a stable ink cost for the component, we limited the amount of inner spheres to 8 (at least for now). Because of this, the ratio of the height of the capsule to its diameter can currently be a maximum of 8:1.

Collision Detection Volume - Hit Events

At its core, the Collision Detection Volume component is composed of four events that output a Collision Data and the velocity of the specific sphere in the collider that hit:

• On Player Hit - fires when hitting any player.

• There is also a corresponding event for this in the Player Definition Board

• If it is part of a hierarchy (e.g. clamped to a Swing Handle), it will not detect hits with the player holding the hierarchy (or seated in it, in the case of a seat or vehicle)

• On Object Hit - fires when hitting any object. 

• If the held object’s hierarchy is held by a player, the output Collision Data will contain both the object hit and the holding player. 

• If it is part of a hierarchy (e.g. clamped to a Swing Handle), it will not detect hits with other objects in the same hierarchy

• On Other Hit - fires when hitting any non-makerpen-selectable object, like the white scene geometry in a Rec Room Studio room or the ground in a copy of ^Park.

• On Any Hit - fires when any of the above three fire, with the exact same data

These all internally manage their own cooldowns. For example, you won’t get a Player Hit event every single frame that the player is inside the collision detection volume, meaning you can easily rely on this to hook up a damage system.

For performance reasons, a Collision Detection Volume component will not detect hits when it isn’t moving unless you specifically toggle a setting in its configuration to allow for this.

Collision Detection Volume - The Object Board

Since we want this to be a core building block for custom melee weapons (though we expect players will find plenty of other uses for it as well), we wanted to make sure hitting something feels significant, and that meant implementing a fun and fully customizable default audio and impulse (applying velocity) on hits. Through much iteration, we now have the current largest default object board of all of our CV2 components.

The default impulse for hit objects is based on the speed of the collision. When we tested hitting props in VR, this is what felt the most natural as it supports variation in impulse between hitting an object slowly or quickly. You’ll notice a new chip in the object impulse section - Request Velocity Set Over Duration.

In our own testing while iterating on these default impulses, one of the issues we noticed was that the physical geometry of a custom sword would interfere with the impulse from the Collision Detection Volume, and half the time a collision just wouldn’t feel right in VR. Our RRO swords, as well as rally buggies, reapply their collision impulses over the course of a few frames, and we wanted to mimic that here. This new chip lets us continuously set the velocity for a fraction of a second after the hit, to make sure that the sword’s physical geometry doesn’t get in the way.

You’ll notice some other new chips in the section of the object board for hitting a player too:

• Vector3 Inverse

• Vector3 Project on Plane

• Player Get Is Grounded

• Velocity Add (New)

The first three chips were important for us to get a good default direction for hitting players. Objects get hit in the direction of the hit itself, but players get hit away from the holding player (if the Collision Detection Volume is part of a held tool). We also wanted to make sure that players didn’t just get impulsed into the ground, especially if they’re on a slope, so we make sure that the hit always goes just a tiny bit “up” in addition to “forward”.

One thing we noticed in early versions of Make it to Midnight is that hitting a player didn’t feel good when it took a few seconds to see them get pushed away. To account for this, we added a new chip Velocity Add (New). This chip simulates the velocity change immediately when it is applied to remote players, and will eventually replace the current Velocity Add chip. This is what allows hammer hits to feel so responsive in Make it to Midnight, and we actually use the same system for our rally buggies on this one as well!

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We look forward to seeing what you create with these new features! If you have any questions about how to use them or want to show off what you’ve done with them, feel free to post in our Discord!

To see dev blogs for other features that we added while working on Make it to Midnight, check out our posts on Data Tables and Room Progression. There’s also one major feature Make it to Midnight uses that we’re still working on before it’s ready for creators–Custom Locomotion! Look forward to seeing that in the new year!

Room Progression

Level up your rooms by leveling up your players! The progression system used in Make it to Midnight is now live in Beta.

The CV2 State Machine

Creators are making incredibly impressive rooms these days. Many of these rooms involve managing lots of data and intricate circuitry, performing remarkably complex tasks. Recently, we talked about how Data Tables can help on the data side. 

Now we’re introducing The State Machine to help on the circuits side - it manages all that awesome complex circuitry easily by breaking things down into simpler states.

Fast Facts

• Simplified Complex Functionality: State Machine chips simplify the management of intricate circuitry in Rooms by breaking it down into simpler states.

• One State at a Time: These chips ensure that only one child state is active at a time, reducing the risk of conflicts between different behaviors and eliminating the need for complicated condition checks across different states.

• Modular Design: Easily add, modify, or remove states within the State Machine, just like you would with a circuit board.

• Nested State Machines: State Machines can also be nested within State chips, allowing for more intricate control over sub-states.

• Synced or Unsynced: State Machines can be configured as synced or unsynced. Synced states provide consistency across players in multi-player environments.

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THE STATE MACHINE CHIPS

You can now add a CV2 State Machine chip to your rooms from the palette to get started. Think of the State Machine chip as a circuit board with a superpower: only one child state is active at a time. That means the events inside a State Machine execute when a state chip is active (and do not execute when that chip is inactive). 

What would a State Machine be without its states? Enter the State chip. If you’re familiar with circuit boards you know that you can edit into them to add more chips. The same is true for the State Machine chip. 

The State chip partners with the State Machine chip. By default, a State Machine chip contains a child State chip. Remember, only one child state is active at any given moment.

Let’s go deeper into the chip hierarchy by editing into that State chip to see what makes it tick. State chips come with child chips that allow you to go to other states and control what happens when entering or exiting this state.

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NPC STATE MACHINE EXAMPLE

Now that you have a rundown of what the State Machine chips are, let’s see them in action!

In games, Non-Playable Characters (or NPCs for short) often use state machines to handle the complex functionality needed to bring these characters to life. Using State chips, we can easily transition to a specific NPC state, regardless of whatever state it happened to be in before.

Let’s create a simple NPC state machine example to see how the pieces come together. Say we want an enemy NPC with three behaviors: patrol, take cover, and attack. 

• Drop a State Machine chip into the room from the palette and use the configuration menu to name it “NPC State Machine”.

• Open up the palette and add in two event definition chips that control the NPC’s behavior: “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player”.

Edit into the State Machine chip. 

• Since State Machine chips come with a child State chip by default, let’s rename this default chip to “Patrol State”. 

• We will also add two more state chips from the palette and rename them “Take Cover State” and “Attack State”.

We want the NPC to patrol by default, so the “Patrol State” state needs to be active. Since we renamed the default State chip that came with the State Machine, we’re all set.

If we ever want to change the default active state, we can do that by configuring the NPC State Machine chip and changing the default state value.

Let’s imagine that our NPC takes out high-tech range-finding binoculars when they start patrolling and puts them away when they stop patrolling. Plus we only want them using binoculars when patrolling. Keep this in mind, we’ll use the binoculars to show how a state machine can help simplify complex functionality later.

• Edit into the “Patrol State” chip to set up what happens when the NPC enters and exits this state. 

• Use the State Did Enter event receiver that’s already in the State chip to execute the circuits needed when “Patrol State" becomes active. In this case, we’ll connect it to a circuit board that tells the NPC to take out its binoculars and start patrolling. 

Similarly, use the State Will Exit event receiver that’s already in the State chip to put the NPC’s binoculars away and stop patrolling whenever this state becomes inactive.

Now let’s tell the NPC what happens when it gets shot at (take cover) or if it sees a player (attack). We make these transitions happen with our State Constant and Go To State chips.

• Add two event receivers and configure them to use the event definitions we created earlier: “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player”.

• We want to create transitions to two other states: “Take Cover State” and “Attack State”. Our State chip comes with one State Constant so we only need to add one more. Configure one of them to “Take Cover State” and the other to “Attack State”.

• Connect one of the State Constants to the Go To State chip that’s already here in our State chip. Add one more Go To State chip from the palette and connect it to the other State Constant. 

• Finally connect our “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player” event receivers to the Go To State chips. Now when the NPC gets shot at, it will go to the take cover state. When the NPC sees the player it will transition to the attack state.

There you have it! We’ve created an NPC that has three separate states that will never conflict with each other because only one child state is active at a time! 

Thanks to this, we don’t need to worry about whether another NPC Got Shot At event receiver inside a different State chip does something that conflicts with our patrol behavior. Event receivers inside inactive State chips don’t execute. No need for complicated condition checks across all of our different states!

Going back to those awesome high tech range-finding binoculars from our example: Our NPC only uses them when they patrol. We made sure that the NPC puts them away when they leave the “Patrol State” by using the State Will Exit event receiver. No matter what state the NPC goes to next, those fancy binoculars are tucked safely away.

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STATE MACHINES INSIDE STATE CHIPS

You can also nest state machines within state chips! Imagine we want states inside our Patrol State chip that decide if the NPC is walking or jogging when they are patrolling. Thanks to the state machine’s superpower, we can! 

When the Patrol State chip is active, its child chips are active too, including child State Machine chips and their children. It works all the way down the chip hierarchy.

Let’s get into how to do this.

• Add a new State Machine chip inside the Patrol State chip and name it “Patrol Behavior State Machine”. 

• Add an event called “NPC Jog” that we can use inside our new State Machine chip. 

Add a mechanism by which an NPC switches between jog and walk. Use a Random Int chip, an If chip, and an Equals chip to send the NPC Jog event randomly to the State chips inside our new State Machine chip. This will randomly tell the NPC to walk or jog!

Edit into our Patrol Behavior State Machine chip and rename the default State chip that’s already there to “Walk State”. This state is active by default, so our NPC walks while it patrols.

• To make it possible to jog, add a new State chip and name it “Jog State”.

Within the Walk State chip, use the State did Enter and State Will Exit chip to make the NPC start walking when entering this state and stop walking before leaving this state. 

• Add and configure an event receiver for the “NPC Jog” event. Conjure a State constant and connect it to a Go To State chip to transition from the walk state to the jog state. If the Random Int chip we set up earlier outputs a zero instead of a one, the “NPC Jog” event executes and we transition to the Jog state.

Now when our NPC is in the patrol state they either walk or jog while patrolling. Importantly, our other states still don’t need to worry at all about what happens when the NPC patrols. When the NPC is taking cover we don’t want them walking around! When the NPC is attacking we don’t want them to use their high-tech binoculars!

Since our states use the State Will Exit event to clean up the current state before leaving, we’ve made it easier to manage and create new functionality for our enemy NPC.

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SYNCED STATE MACHINES

One last thing before you dive into creating your own state machines to make your functionality simpler to think about, manage, and expand on: state machines can be synced or unsynced. A synced state machine’s active state makes the experience consistent across all players in your room. Just use the configure tool on your State Machine chip and look for the Synced toggle. 

Data Tables and Rewards

Managing lots of data in Circuits, especially stuff like sequential strings for dialogue or the details of a progression system, has always been pretty tricky. It requires a ton of variables and complex graphs to select which to use in a given circumstance.

It’s more typical for game designers to use a specialized tool for things like this - like a good ol’ spreadsheet! Given the excitement around Make it to Midnight’s progression and this need, we’re introducing Data Tables, a tool to help make this easier.

Pictured: In-development version of data tables. The UI may be slightly different upon full release. 

How do DATA TABLES work?

To start with Data Tables, spawn a Data Table definition chip with the maker pen and configure it to get to the edit screen. From there, you can add columns and rows. Each column is assigned a Type - int, float, bool, string, color, or Reward (more on these later!)

Input your data, adding or copying or moving columns and rows as needed, and then save. 

⚠️Important: You must use the “Save” button in the data table editing UI, which will then save the room. Saving the room via any other method - including another player saving it while you’re editing - may result in lost work. 

Once there’s data in your table, you can use more chips to pull it out of the table and into the rest of your code.

Configure the DataTable Get Cell chip to point at a specific Data Table and column. (You’ve gotta specify the column in advance because we’ve gotta know the Type of the output pin!) Then, you can extract data from that column on a per-row basis.

The idea is that each row is a set of similar data, and you’re doing the same operation on different sets depending on the circumstances. Let’s say you’ve got a table named Enemies that contains details about various enemy encounters:

You can notify players about each kill and hand out gold with a relatively small graph. Here’s a simplified version here:

You can also search for information within the Data Table. Using DataTable Get Rows Containing or DataTable Get First Row Containing you can reference row information based on the name string “Goblin” (sorry, exact matches only). Or you can pull a random Challenge 6 enemy to throw at your players without having to hard-code what row in the table they’re on.

Rewards

Rewards are a way to pack keys, currency quantities, and consumable bundles into a data table with a consistent and slightly fancier presentation. Rewards are used heavily in the upcoming Progression system (more info about that soon!), and you may have noticed that the gif at the top of this post is from Make it to Midnight, where we’re using Rewards for the Perks. 

You make Rewards a lot like you make Keys and Consumables. Check your Room Settings for a new tab!

Once your room has some Rewards ready to go, you can put them in a data table and/or directly grant them to players with the Reward Constant and the Grant Reward chip. (For those curious, Make it to Midnight’s Perks uses Rewards to grant Keys, and then those Keys enable Circuits behaviors by using Player Owns Room Key as a filter.)

There’s also a new Show Reward Notification chip that you can use to notify players of between 1-3 Rewards at once.

For advanced users

Don’t want to type in all your data manually?

There’s an Import button on the Data Table edit screen. It’s expecting CSV, which you can usually export from other spreadsheets:

Here’s an example of the formatting it’s looking for:

schema:

Score,int

Speed,float

Title,string

CanUseTurret,bool

Rank,Color

data:

10,1.5,Scaredy Cat,False,8080FF

200,2.75,Brave Warrior,True,FF80FF

500,3.25,Expert Player,True,FF8000

Note: This doesn’t work for Rewards. You’re better off leaving those blank and hooking them up in the game.

What’s next?

A Progression system that builds on Data Tables and Rewards - as seen in Make it to Midnight - is coming Soon™.   Watch this space for a tour when it ships!

Avatar Movement & Gameplay

In past blogs in this series, we’ve talked a lot about how the new full-body option will look. In this one, we’ll show off how it moves and interacts with the game world.

Just chillin’

There are so many ways we express ourselves through our avatar’s movements. We point, give a thumbs up, jump, slide, and dance. We shoot lasers, dodge paintballs, throw dodgeballs, and raise our hands in celebration! The full-body option needs to look great doing all those things and more. As you can see from that list, how we move our hands is a big part of how we interact with the world, so let’s start there.

Helping Hands

One of the most important ways we use our hands in Rec Room is to connect with other players. When we wave hello, fist bump to join a party, or give a high-five, we’re expressing ourselves to others, and we want those expressions to look great. To accomplish that, we need to think from the hand through the wrist, arm, elbow, shoulder, and even down through the torso, hip, and legs. 

Pretend someone you know is across a crowded room from you, and wave at them. Do it now. We’ll wait. Notice how your whole body moves and shifts a bit as you raise your arm. Those are the subtle movements we’re trying to capture in the avatar animations to make them feel alive.

Hello there!

Another area we think a lot about with hands is how they hold objects. Currently, your hand disappears when holding any object. While this was useful in the early days of VR, as we develop full-body avatars, we want hands to be more expressive as you grab objects. It would look a bit weird to cut off your hand while holding something, so instead, your hand and fingers take a position that is natural for each object. You'll pick up a coffee mug like you normally would and throw a frisbee while grabbing an edge. Picking up objects will feel more realistic, and your hands will seamlessly pose to a natural fit for everything in Rec Room. You'll be able to do all the same things you normally can, except now the objects will be connected to your avatar via your hand. 

And it’s not just hands and fingers around objects that we’re thinking about. With finger tracking, we need to think about the full range of finger movement. You’ll no longer be restricted to a small set of hand motions. Want to wiggle your fingers - go for it! Want to bust out the horns - rock out! Want to put up a peace sign - groovy! (Note: finger tracking will ship after the full-body avatar option, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t stoked about it.)

Here’s an example of how hands might move with finger tracking

Get a Move On

Let’s zoom out and look at how the rest of the body moves. There are several ways we move around in Rec Room: walk, run, jump, climb, crawl, slide, and wall run. Each of those needs to look good individually, and the transitions between them need to be seamless. Also, even more so than hand movements, these actions require the whole avatar to be moving in sync to look natural. Take a look at the run animation below. Notice how it’s important to get the arms, shoulders, and head moving in sync with the legs.

Walking, Jogging, and running are looking pretty good. Climbing… still needs some work

Game Balance

One of the questions we’ve gotten about the full-body option is, “How will it affect game balance in PVP rooms?” Specifically, since the full-body option has more surface to get hit, will people who choose that option be at a disadvantage in rooms like ^Paintball? 

We see Rec Room as a fundamentally casual game, one that isn’t optimized for rigorous competition, but we still took that question seriously. We ran playtests with some of the most skilled paintballers at Rec Room, where we pitted a team of floating beans against a team of full bodies. The same players took turns using each avatar option, and any part of the avatar hit with a paintball counted as a KO. We found floating beans don’t have a significant advantage (and we found the full bodies are delightful to compete against).

With all that in mind, here’s the plan. You will be able to play with either avatar option in any room. Any part of the avatar you can see (arms, legs, etc.) will be a part you can hit. For competitive formats, like Leagues, where even the tiniest advantage seems meaningful, organizers are welcome to restrict participants to one avatar type or another.  

Full-body or floating bean, you’re gonna get KO’d if you stand on a container and let everyone shoot you🙂

What’s Next?

Looking back on the whole blog series, we’ve given you the gist of how the full-body avatar option will look, move, and represent you in the Roomiverse. But there’s one more big piece we haven’t gone deep on yet. The full body is the foundation that you’ll build on when you make your own clothing and, eventually, your own avatars. We’ll dig into that in the next avatars blog.  

But before we get to that, we’d like to leave you with the latest iteration of the full-body option!

What do you think?

Avatar Faces

In this fourth installment of the Avatar Dev Blog series, we’ll talk about the face of the full-body avatar option. The new face will look a lot like the floating bean’s face with a few noteworthy additions. Let’s take it from top to bottom.

The grid shows how the face is divided up under the hood.

Eyebrows

Eyebrows are a new optional addition to the full-body avatar. We added them to give your facial expressions more depth. They’ll be in the same drawn-on style we love with that charming wiggle like the eyes and the mouth. This brings them to life and lets us incorporate them into the facial animations when you emote.

A fun animation test (not actual gameplay) of an avatar emoting with its eyebrows.

At launch, you’ll get to pick from three different eyebrow shapes with the ability to adjust their size and position. We also want to give the customization option to go without eyebrows, since even though we feel like it expands the range of expression, we heard the feedback that some of you would prefer to express yourselves without them.

Thin, medium, and thick in three different styles.

Eyes

The full-body option will have many of the eye shapes you’re familiar with, along with a bunch of new options so you can really dial in your look. They work with all the emotes like the old ones do, so you’ll still be able to express your love 😍 or joy 😂 through your eyes. 

We’ve also added an eye shine to all the eyes to bring a bit more life and gravity to the avatar’s face through added contrast between the eye and highlight. Without the eye highlights, the eyes felt duller in comparison to the newly upgraded body. You might notice below that we’ve turned down the shine a bit from what you saw in the last concepts. We too thought they were a bit too distracting at their original brightness level.

We love how each eye gives the face a different character.

Noses

Another new addition to the full-body avatar’s face is the nose. We found that one of the more effective ways to express yourself through your avatar is to have an identifiable silhouette. So we explored noses as a way to define your silhouette from the side. Even though it’s a relatively small part of the avatar, we found it to be surprisingly effective at giving each avatar a unique look. 

This also explains why the nose isn’t in that drawn-on style like the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth. They are there to give you facial expressions, while the nose is there to define the form of your face.

In our iteration and experimentation, it became clear that overall the full-body design was more appealing with a nose than without, but we heard that some of you felt strongly that you wanted “no nose” as an option to express yourselves. With that in mind, at launch, you’ll get to pick from about eight nose styles and tweak their size and position, or choose to have no nose if you prefer to rock that Voldemort style.

You can see here how the nose dramatically changes the vibe of the silhouette.

And the Rest

The mouths are the same for the full body as they are for the floating bean, and they will work the same way.  Your options for face/head shape will be similar as well. The color of the skin on the face will be a tiny bit different though. We’re adding more depth to the skin color. This lets us give faces a bit of a flush to make them feel more alive. It also lets us have lighter palms on the hands of darker skin tones for better representation. 

Note the lighter palms.

What’s Next?

As you can see, we’ve already made several iterations to the face based on your feedback, so keep it coming. While we think it’s getting close, we plan on having a few more rounds of interaction before we add the full-body option to the game. Speaking of games, in the next blog, we’ll look closer at how the full body will affect gameplay, and see it in motion!

Quest 1 Support

Hey there, Rec Room fans!

We’ve received some support questions and feedback and wanted to confirm that we are no longer supporting Quest 1.

We understand that this news may come as a disappointment to players still using this platform. As a team, we're constantly striving to provide the best experience possible, and unfortunately, the age and technical limitations of Quest 1 have made it challenging for us to continue supporting it.

We want to thank all our Quest 1 players for being part of the Rec Room community, and we hope you'll continue to enjoy the game on our other supported platforms. We're committed to continuing to bring exciting updates and new features to Rec Room, and we can't wait to share what we have in store with all of you (especially something big later this year…)

Thank you for your understanding and continued support! Game on! 🎮😊

Rec Room Studio and Generative AI

Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock, you’ve probably experienced the hype around generative AI. We wanted to share our thoughts on how we think these powerful new tools will impact Rec Room, especially Rec Room Studio.

While it’s early days, we think the hype is warranted! Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and others are becoming more powerful at an impressive clip. Every day announces intriguing new possibilities for streamlining, enhancing and even completely revolutionizing the art and science of game development.

We are excited for Rec Room creators to integrate AI tools into their workflow. And the obvious starting point for doing that is Rec Room Studio (RRS). Just as RRS allows creators to import and utilize content from Blender, Maya, Photoshop, and a whole constellation of other tools, it’s also a great vehicle for AI-generated content.

Here are some of the experiments we’ve seen so far…

Creator Emma Bitt used generative tools to generate parts of her amazing room “Mountain Spirits”. You can visit it right now!

https://rec.net/d/room/MountainSpirits

RRS design lead @zizzyphus has been using Midjourney to create textures for her WIP “Quilted World” room:

And @gribbly has been experimenting with integrating ChatGPT directly into Rec Room Studio (inspired by AICommand by Keijiro Takahashi of Unity Japan). In the following images, the red spiraling shapes were generated via a ChatGPT prompt entered directly in the Rec Room Studio UI, then published to all of Rec Room’s supported platforms instantly:

These examples barely scratch the surface of what will be possible by combining generative AI with Rec Room Studio. But we think they point at an incredibly powerful workflow for our creators.

We invite you to help us discover what’s possible - we can’t wait to see what you build/generate!

Avatar Embodiment

Welcome to the third dev blog about the next evolution of Rec Room avatars. In the last blogs we talked about the optional full-body avatar and how clothes will work with it. Here we’ll look at another benefit you’ll get with the full-body option - enhanced embodiment leading to greater self expression. The new avatar system sets us up for full-body and finger tracking, but even if you don’t have tracking capabilities, seeing an avatar that looks and moves more like you is a real boost to immersion. 

A concept image showing a peek inside the full-body option while it’s being controlled by a player with full-body tracking. 

What makes the avatar move?

First, let’s take a high-level look at the bits inside the avatar that enable you to bring it to life.

The avatar has a skeleton that defines its base form, how all the pieces are linked together, and ultimately how it can move. Then there’s the model which goes over the skeleton and defines the shape of the avatar that we see. The skeleton and model come together to define how you look when you move.

Lastly, we add animations to make the avatar seem alive when you’re idle, and keep the movements smooth and understandable while you’re active. There’s lots of tweaking and tuning done at each layer to make sure the avatar’s body doesn’t fold or bend in weird ways as you move around.

From left to right, the underlying skeleton, the skin and clothing we layer on top, and the animations that make it move.

Yeah, but how do I make the avatar move?

With a basic VR setup the inverse-kinematics system (IK) will place your elbows and shoulders in specific locations based on the position of your headset and controllers. This is the same tech we use when you wear a full-body costume currently. Guessing where your arms are by the location of your head and hands is a hard problem. We’ll iterate on how to make the upper body animation look good, but if you want the most accurate representation of how you’re moving - that’s where full-body tracking comes in. With SteamVR’s full-body tracking tech you’ll be able to tap into more of this IK system to position your full-body avatar’s elbows, chest, hips, knees, and feet! 

For finger tracking, we’ll be adding support for the newest Meta Quest headsets. Point 👉, give a peace sign ✌, throw the horns 🤘…and your avatar will do the same. Maybe at some point you’ll be able to ditch the controllers altogether.

We’re hoping to have support for full-body tracking when we launch the full-body option later this year, but bear with us if it comes out a bit after the initial launch. Finger tracking will take us a little longer, but we’ll get there.

Work-in-progress hand model

How do you blend animations and my movement?

Without tracking, your movements will be responsible for the full-body avatar’s upper body (head, shoulders, arms) while avatar animations are responsible for the pose of their lower body (hips, legs, feet). This is because in VR we don't actually know where your legs and feet are located so we have to rely on an artist's interpretation - since we do know where your head and hands are, we try to pose your avatar to respect your real VR pose.

However, if you're using full-body tracking then we’ll know where your legs and feet are - so we can dynamically switch between using avatar animations and VR tracking information to pose your lower body depending on the situation.

While you're running around we'll continue to play animations on your legs - despite the fact your real legs aren't actually moving - so that you appear to be running to other players in Rec Room. Once you stop walking in-game we'll blend back to showing your real leg positions so that you can dance and pose however you like.

Okay, it’ll move like me but will it look like me?

Just like with the current floating bean avatar, the full-body option will let you adjust the shape of your body. But instead of just a few options, you’ll be able to set the individual sizes and shapes of lots of different body parts - enabling near-infinite possibilities. With these new settings you’ll be able to create a more accurate (or idealized) depiction of yourself to embody. The settings we’re currently discussing include the ability to adjust: your height, the length of your torso, the width of your shoulders, belly, and hips, and the thickness of your arms and legs. We’ll have several options to adjust your face as well, but we’ll go into them further in a future blog. 

A mockup of what the body adjustment settings might look like.

What’s next?

Speaking of that future blog, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from you on the eyebrows and noses of the full-body option, so we’re dedicating the next blog in the series to the face. We’ll talk about the evolution of facial features, show off some of the options you’ll get to pick from to customize your face, and talk about the changes we’ve made based on your feedback.

Dressing the Full-Body Avatar

One of the main reasons we're developing the full-body avatar option is to give you even more ways to express yourself in Rec Room! We believe one big part of how you express yourself comes from the clothing that you wear. As we said in our last dev blog, the full-body option will support all existing avatar items at release. Today we’ll talk about how that will work, and about the new items the full-body will unlock.

Converting Torso Items

Sleeves were one of the first parts of dressing the full-body we thought about. None of the existing items have meaningful sleeves since the floating beans don’t have arms, so we had two options - have all tops on the full-body be sleeveless or figure out a smart way to add sleeves to the old items when they are on the full-body. We decided on the latter. 

To do that we needed to create a universal sleeve design that could apply to the many different styles of torso items Rec Room has to offer. We've created these concept designs, where one of our skilled 3d artists will then take a sleeve style that best matches the base item and cut holes, stitch, and apply color and materials to each item. The end result will be sleeves that look like they were there all along! 

All items at release will have a version for floating beans and one for full-bodies. This image shows how we plan to create the latter from the former.

Once we figured out the plan for sleeves, we had to address the fact that many torso items already included a bit of a “leg item” in them. For example, the tan pants on the hoodies above or the skirt on the jacket dress below. We can’t just extend them all the way down, since we want you to be able to mix and match tops and bottoms so you have greater ability to get your avatar to look like you want it to. So again we’ll turn to our awesome 3d artists.

Each torso item will get individual treatment so it looks great on the full body option.

For some items, like the hoodie, where a leg item is implied, they’ll trim off the bottom bit letting you replace it with whatever it you want. For other items, like the jacket dress, where it’s more all one piece, they’ll leave the bottom bit in place, and you’ll get to choose what you want to wear under it (e.g. a pair of tights).

Converting Hand Items

Another bit of anatomy you’ll get with the full-body option is fingers. That means we need to figure out how to make a bunch of items that were made for a wristless mitten-hand work on a hand with five digits that’s attached to an arm. 

This one is more of a work in progress, but we hope the same principle we used for sleeves will work here. In a sense, we’ll have five little sleeves, one for each finger, that those awesome artists will match to our existing items to turn mittens into gloves.

Ironing Out the Wrinkles

While we’ll do our best, converting old items to work with the full-body option won’t be 100% perfect. There will likely be bits that look off or broken at first. But we’ll keep iterating on them until we get all the wrinkles out.

And don’t worry, none of these changes will affect the items when floating beans wear them. If you choose to stick with the floating bean avatar your items will look like they always have!

New Leg and Foot Items!

Now for the shiny, sparkly new stuff we're really excited to introduce - leg and foot items! We think this new clothing goes a long way to helping you be yourself, or whoever you want to be, in Rec Room.

For foot items, we’ll have about four starter options at launch. We’re currently thinking: sneakers, boots, flats, and sandals. Sneakers will likely be the default because it's unsanitary to be walking around the Rec Center in bare feet. We’ll add more foot items as time goes on.

These shoes are for mock-up purposes only, but we’re excited for all the potential foot items. Flippers? Bunny slippers? So many possibilities!

Similar to the foot items, we’ll have about four starter leg items and more soon after. We’re thinking about starting with jeans (default), tights, shorts, and a skirt.

What else should we add?

What’s Next?

We’ll be making lots more of all kinds of items, and might eventually take advantage of other new item slots that the full-body option gives us. No promises, but here are some things we’ve discussed: nail polish, socks, and nose and eyebrow piercings.

Let us know what you’d like to see!

Also, the work we’re doing under the hood for the full-body option will allow you to make avatar items for each other, but that’s a topic for another dev blog.

The Future of Avatars in Rec Room

When Rec Room first launched in 2016, we thought of it as kind of like  the “Wii Sports of VR.” At the time, our avatar designs followed the best practices for VR while keeping them charming and approachable. We avoided showing untracked legs and arms because it could break the feeling of presence; we kept facial features cute and minimal to avoid the uncanny valley effect; and we chose simplicity over visual detail so the game ran smoothly. Also, we were a small team with limited time and resources so we chose to keep our avatars simple.

We love the resulting “floating bean” avatars, and know you love them too. But a lot has changed in Rec Room over the last six years. We’re now a bigger team, VR technology has gotten and continues to get better, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t with how you look and move in VR.  Our “Wii Sports of VR” has evolved into a radically cross-platform, social UGC platform. It's time to evolve how we can express ourselves in Rec Room.

Thus the full-body avatar. The arms, legs, fingers, and feet of this new full-body option provide more opportunities for you to be who you want to be in Rec Room. They also let us track movements better in VR, and help make the game more understandable when we share it with friends. 

A concept showing what the full-body option might look like

At the end of last year, we assembled a small team called the "Avatar Initiative" to take the next step towards full-body avatars. Instead of working behind the scenes and revealing a new avatar option as part of an update, we decided to share our progress as we build. Your feedback will help us shape our work so we do our best to make Rec Room better without losing the things that make it special.

Our Design Values for Full-Body Avatars

We take it seriously that any change to avatars is a big deal and might disappoint those who have fallen in love with the floating bean style. So we have decided that it's a top priority to get these two things right:

1. When we release the full-body avatar, you will not be required to adopt it. The option to choose the new avatar or remain a floating bean will be yours. We will work hard to not change the look of your avatar for you.

2. The full-body avatar option will fully support all existing items at release. You’ve spent time and money building your identity and outfits, and we don’t want to mess with them!

😳 That's a lot of stuff we've made over the last 6 years

What’s Next?

You let us know your thoughts about our new initiative in Zendesk or on our Discord, and stay tuned for more dev blogs about full-body avatars  as the details firm up. There’s lots to consider: how will leg and foot items work, what impact will the full-body option have on gameplay, in what new ways can you customize your avatar… We'll continue updating you on where we're heading, why we've chosen to go there, and what comes next.

Hierarchical Building

This is a quick overview of our Hierarchical Building alpha preview! I’ll cover how to find it, how to use it, and what’s not working yet. 
If you’d like to walk through it step by step, here is a survey-style tutorial for the basics! (You don’t have to submit, but we’d love your feedback if you’re so inclined!)

What is hierarchical building?

A hierarchical object is an object made up of other objects, just like things in the real world. If you took apart an oscillating desk fan you’d have a collection of other objects - blades, buttons, and motors. Attaching them to each other in the right order is what lets the blades of the fan spin while its head oscillates, but at the end it’s still a single object that you can interact with without thinking about its many parts. 
An object here is defined as any amount of stuff in a container. Think of these containers like our old shape containers, except they can hold more than just shapes - chips, props, components, and even other containers. This is the basis of a hierarchy: containers with other containers inside them.

How do I get started?

Create a new Maker Room. In the room settings, enable the Creative Beta. Once the automatic save is completed, you’ll have a new toggle for the Hierarchical Building Alpha Preview. Enable that, it’ll save again, and then you’re there.

NOTE:  It is STRONGLY recommended that you don’t flip this switch on a room that you care about without making a backup copy first. Not everything works in a hierarchical room yet, and while you should be able to roll back using room restore, this is a one way conversion, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. 

How to make a hierarchy

If you create a new shape at room scope, we’ll add a container above it for you. You’ll be moved inside the scope of your new container so you can just continue drawing - like shape containers today.

Only containers can have children!

Otherwise, there are two primary ways to make an object:

• The Quick Action Menu available on the Select tool has a “Create Object” option (renamed from Merge.) Create Object will place your selection into a new container.

• The Connect Tool - connecting one object to another will attempt to make the first object a child of the second. The order matters!

  • If the parent object is a container, the first object will become a child of the container.

  • If the parent is a shape, it will be put into a new container, and then the first object will become a child of that container.

“Scope” is the word we use to define where you’re at in a hierarchy. Your edit scope determines what you can edit, and in some cases, what you can see. “Room scope” is the outermost scope. If you’re inside a container, you’re in that container’s scope, and anything that isn’t “in scope” for editing will be faded out or hidden.

You can use these tools at any scope. Using “Create Object” on a selection of children will create another container, and those shapes will end up one scope lower than they were before.

Navigating a hierarchy

The “Edit” button is how you navigate up and down a hierarchy. If you’re inside a container you’ll see both “Edit” and “Edit Out” at the top of your maker pen menu. Edit Out will take you up a scope, and the Edit tool will take you into the scope of whatever your highlighted target is. 

You can name your containers in the config menu, and you’ll see a preview of their name whenever you edit into them.

You’ll also find these options in the Quick Action Menu when you’re using the Select tool. Edit Out will always be available if you’re inside an object, while Edit In will only be available if your selection is a container. 

The Quick Action Menu also contains other useful options:

• Split to Parent moves the selected object up one scope

• Split to Room moves a selected object up to the room scope

• Create Object is always present to let you add another layer to the hierarchy

• Center Pivot will center the object point on your current selection.

New Looks

When you start pointing at objects, you’ll notice some new highlight colors. If you point at a shape, chip or prop within your current scope, it will highlight in green as it always has. But if what you’re hovering over is a complex object - a container with stuff in it - it’ll be blue instead, and you’ll see a small holographic box that represents its pivot point.

When you edit into an object, that holographic pivot point preview turns into a small UI widget, similar to our transform handles, that shows local axis colors and can be selected, moved, and rotated. We call this the “object point.” By moving the object point, you’re also moving the pivot point of the object, and when you edit back out again, you’ll see that the holographic pivot preview has moved to reflect any changes you made. 

Gizmos

There are a few things that have changed conceptually, but the visuals haven’t caught up yet! The one I want to mention here is gizmos. 

In a hierarchy, gizmos are containers that can move their children. Therefore, connecting something to a gizmo is done the same way as with any other container. 

What this means is that it no longer matters whether you target the gizmo’s body or the metal axis. All that matters is the order in which you’re doing it. Connecting an object to a rotator will make that object the child of the rotator. Connecting a rotator to an object will make the rotator a child of the object instead. 

Hierarchical Circuits

The circuit layer exists in every scope. As you navigate up and down an object’s hierarchy, you’re simultaneously navigating that object’s circuit hierarchy, too. Any container with chips has an object board that displays the same name as the container. Editing the visible object or its board will take you into the object’s scope.

The object point acts as the anchor for the object board and the scope origin for stuff like “Set Position,” too!

As you navigate a hierarchy, chips appear or not based on whether or not they’re in your current scope. While objects above your scope are grayed out, all chips outside of your scope are hidden completely (though there’s a setting to change this if you’d like to.) 

Tip: Detach your object boards for the best editing experience. We’ll probably make this automatic but we haven’t yet. :]

Tip: Moving things to a new scope in your hierarchy can break existing circuit wires. We recommend that you get your hierarchy as you want it before you do a bunch of wiring!

Known Issues

Props will not function as parents! Not all props - especially interactive props - will function in a hierarchy as children. 

• What for sure DOES work as child objects: Buttons, toggle buttons, and most components without a player input mechanism (e.g. lights, audio players)

• What for sure DOESN’T work: Invisible collision, Gun and Trigger handles, all CV1 objects, most interactive props.

• Avoid for now: Costume dummies, seats

• Edit tool does not work on Object Boards. Target Containers and Gizmos directly to edit into them. You can't currently access a prop's board at all.

Not yet implemented:

• Collision, grabbability, and physics settings

• Tube control point editing

• Undo/Redo

• Clone

• Copy/Paste
  

If you get stuck

• If you try to delete something that doesn’t work, you’ve probably run across something that isn’t supported yet. The best thing to do is leave without saving (and we’re sorry about any lost work - we’re chasing these down one by one!) 

• Rolling back to an old save should work, even if that old save is before you flipped the Hierarchical Building switch.
  

Got feedback?

We’d love to hear it!  Please join us in Discord or leave us a note on our new Hierarchical Building Zendesk. Keep an eye out for a survey from Coach - in a few weeks, we’ll send one to everyone who’s participated. 

Custom Shirts Marketplace

Custom Shirts Marketplace: The First Step of a Grand Plan

The Economy Team at Rec Room just rolled out the marketplace features of one of our most ambitious projects - Custom Shirts!

Our team’s goal is to make Rec Room a place where our creators can be rewarded (and paid!) for the amazing things they make. Our grand ambition is to build a marketplace where our players make everything they can buy and wear. We believe there is a HUGE market opportunity if we get it right.

Since June of this year, RR+ members have been using the Clothing Customizer tool (found in their backpack) to create their own graphic tees to wear on their Rec Room avatars. Whatever markers, paintbrushes, or gizmos they can use to draw on a whiteboard or art canvas, they can now use to draw their own designs on the front and back of a t-shirt.

When we launched this feature, we were excited (and honestly a little nervous) to see what our players would create. We’ve really enjoyed seeing all of the different designs everyone has been making and wearing.

Like this cute custom shirt from Gen #9930 on Discord!

As we thought about this marketplace, we realized there are some hard problems to figure out. Here are the 4 biggest questions that we faced:

1. The Avatar Ink Question: How do we reduce ink costs for items players wear, to open up more possibilities for creators? Ink is how we measure the cost to render items, gizmos, costumes, etc in Rec Room. It’s important that the game looks good and runs smoothly across all rooms and on all of our devices, including all of our supported Android and iOS phones.

2. The Authoring Question: How do we make it easy enough for creators to author the things players wear? And make sure that we don’t lose the charm of what makes Rec Room look like Rec Room.

3. The Moderation Question: If we let our players make the things our players can wear ANYWHERE, how big of a bee hive are we unleashing on our moderators? There’s a big difference between managing rooms that players choose to go to, and moderating what people can wear in the Rec Center .

4. The Economy Question: How do we find the balance between enough of a free marketplace so our creators can experiment and enough regulation to avoid exploitation or a race to the bottom? It’s taken us a lot of experimentation to figure out how to best position and price what we sell in the Store (and we’re still figuring it out for ourselves). 

But here’s the thing about how we go after hard problems at Rec Room: instead of spending many months trying to design (and guess) what might be the solution, we build something we can ship fast, so we can learn from our players what the solution should be.

This is why coming out with Custom Shirts felt like the perfect way to test our hypotheses for our grander ambition.

Let’s break it down question by question on why Custom Shirts felt like the right next step.

What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Avatar Ink Question

Costumes were the first step towards building a way for our players to create what they wear

We’ve been testing creator made outfits ever since we released the Costume prop in rooms. It allowed us to get feedback from creators on what works (attaching shapes to the body parts of a mannequin works better than expected!) and what doesn’t work (costumes are way too expensive and hard to use for a lot of our players).

In order to make costumes wearable everywhere, we have a lot of work to do to manage their ink cost. So we asked ourselves, do we really need to go after this big technical problem to learn all the things we want to learn?

We love drawing on shirts in games like Animal Crossing: New Horizon, and that gave us an idea. What if we simplify the problem by starting with customizing the texturing on pre-defined clothing, like drawing on a graphic tee!

This decision to use textures had a few great benefits. 

1. To make this work on our servers, all we needed to do is store a single 1 megapixel image for the front and back of each custom shirt. 

2. Since each custom shirt uses the same base material and geometry, we have fewer concerns about the look of Rec Room changing too much if the Rec Center is filled with custom shirts.

3. To make this work in the game, we needed to solve how to display textures in an optimized way so we could have up to 40 different custom shirts in a single room. 

This is a much easier problem than getting costumes to work across the game, but there were still some challenges of having this work across the 9 different platforms we support.

For example, we needed to ensure that wearing custom shirts didn’t cause performance issues on mobile devices. To show a custom shirt on an avatar, we need to compress the image on that shirt - a way for us to reduce the file size of that image. However, what happens if 40 people enter a room, all wearing custom shirts that we need to compress? Would the game crash?

We needed to answer this question before adding a way to make custom shirts. So, before we made the clothing customizer - or any kind of creation process - we needed a prototype!

Our first instinct was to grab an image, put it on a shirt, compress it, and see what happened. Because we didn’t have any drawn custom shirts yet, we decided to just use the player’s profile picture. Behold, the very first “custom shirt”

Truly horrifying

We repeated this process 40 times and did some profiling on it. Luckily, we found that the image compression didn’t cause any major problems. This gave us a good signal that once we added hand-drawn shirts into the game, we wouldn’t see any major changes in room performance.

What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Authoring Question

Examples of some beautiful 2D art our players make using the existing drawing tools

We had confidence that a lot of different kinds of creators can make great 2D drawings on the art canvases that have been in Rec Room for years.

By making a graphic tee be a new kind of canvas, it made it super easy for a wide range of creators to get started. When we launched Custom Shirts, we were seeing compelling new avatar content almost immediately. In the first 41 hours, more than 71,000 shirts were published! At the peak there were more than 3,700 shirts created PER HOUR across approximately 1,000 unique RR+ players ! In the 4 months since the feature has been released, over 400k custom shirts have been published.

Since Custom Shirts was released in June of this year, over 400k custom shirts have been published.

If we launched a feature where customization required using a Makerpen to draw 3D shapes on a costume mannequin, there’s no way we would have attracted this magnitude of creation. Having more creators use the feature means we can learn more about what they want.

We want to get to a place where players can eventually use 3D shapes to create the things they wear, but since our end game is to create a rich ecosystem with a large variety of creators, it feels right that our first customization feature had a lower bar to entry.

The problem is that this lower bar to entry is what leads us to the next problem. Because it’s easier for creators to customize what they wear into the Rec Center, it’s also easier for bad actors to violate the Code of Conduct in a public room.

The Code of Conduct that all players agree to when they sign up

Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about the The Moderation Question

“We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would take until an inappropriate shirt was published. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.”

From the first design doc, we knew that once we made it easy to draw anything on an avatar’s shirt, it would be a matter of minutes after releasing the feature that the first inappropriate shirt was published. We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would be. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.

What we didn’t want is to overwhelm our moderation team with so many inappropriate shirts that we lose our community’s trust in our ability to maintain our Code of Conduct.

We weren’t sure the extent of how many bad actors would emerge, or what tools we would need to manage them. But we knew that avoiding the problem wasn’t an option if we wanted to go after the grander ambition.

We did a few things to manage the risk:

Only creators with a RR+ subscription could publish and wear shirts. We thought the players who are more bought in to Rec Room (literally) would be less likely to create content that violates the CoC. And for everyone who became an RR+ subscriber just so they could make an inappropriate shirt, thanks for helping pay our moderation team!

We wrote enough tooling so our moderation team could easily address issues as they are reported, our in-game moderators could have insta-ban hammers, and anyone who had a bad reputation or a custom shirt under moderation review would be disallowed from publishing any more shirts.

For our first release, we made it so our players could publish shirts that only they could wear. So if an inappropriate shirt appeared on our platform, it couldn’t easily spread to other players.

Of the 400k custom shirts created so far only around 1.7% shirts have been reported and moderated. That’s still higher than we would like (that’s about 6,800 shirts!), but within reason that our world class moderation team has been able to manage it. It’s also helped inform how to improve our tooling including helping us write a feature to automate moderation using the training data from the last four months.

Now that we’ve built up our moderating muscle for Custom Shirts, it’s given us confidence that we can take our next step. It’s time to build a creator-driven avatar economy!

Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about The Economy Problem

Shortly after we released the ability to make custom shirts in the dorm room, something really interesting happened.

^MorbMachine, a room that used the clothing customizer to print Morbius shirt designs using circuits and gizmos, started topping the charts. It became one of our most popular rooms within a day. This was a surprise to us for a couple of reasons:

We hadn’t intended for the clothing customizer to be usable outside of the dorm room, and

People were VERY excited about this room and the custom shirts it created.

^MorbMachine, along with other shirt-printing rooms, quickly became a hit on the platform. We proudly wore our Morbius shirts in-game. Every day was Morbin Time! But more than anything, this room helped us realize that we really needed a way for players to share their shirts with each other.

Proudly showing off a community made custom shirt from the ^MorbMachine room

Unfortunately, we found a bug that was causing a 10% increase in crashes. In order to fix this, we needed to stop initializing the customizer upon entering most rooms, meaning it could no longer be spawned outside of a dorm.

But this would break ^MorbMachine. None of us wanted to do that. We decided the best compromise would be allowing any rooms currently using the feature to continue using it, as long as they didn’t update the room. In the future, we may let creators turn on customizer spawning on a per-room basis, because we really don’t want these types of rooms to go away forever.

The viral success of ^MorbMachine and other custom shirt printing rooms has taught us a lot about the community. Rec Room players will always find a way to DIY. When custom shirts came out, we didn’t provide a marketplace to the community - the community did it themselves. That’s so cool!

We also learned a valuable lesson here: this feature is the start of a new type of Rec Room economy, so it’s important that we got the official marketplace right from the beginning.

Building a new economy is all about trust. If a creator utilizes their talent and spends their time to make a really cool item to sell, can they trust that they’ll be properly rewarded? If a player buys a custom shirt from the marketplace, can they trust they’re paying a fair amount? If a creator makes something that a lot of players want but it might have copyright material, can our creators and players trust that the situation will be handled appropriately?

We’ve worked hard to figure out pricing for the beautiful and engaging items our art team adds to the game. It’s been a challenge finding the right balance of setting an amount that players feel comfortable with, while also considering the business needs of the Rec Room team.

Launching the Custom Shirts marketplace is the first step towards handing off what we’ve learned to our creators.

In this next phase, these 3 potential pitfalls are keeping us up at night:

1. Creators might underprice their work which devalues their contribution to the platform. It also hurts other creators. Players will come to expect lower prices for high quality work, and it’s so hard to raise prices once those expectations are set.

2. If we allow everyone to start selling shirts, custom shirts might flood the market such that high quality work will get lost in the noise, and the sheer volume of supply will suppress value across the market.

3. We have a suspicion that many creators will make popular custom shirts with copyrighted material. The overhead of policing this kind of behavior could be unmanageable. Just like with moderation, if it goes unchecked, it will undercut the trust of an open marketplace.

To manage these pitfalls, we’re starting the market with a curated list of featured custom shirts. Creators can submit their shirts to be featured through the Ink Inc Discord (recroom.com/inkinc) in the #featured-custom-shirts channel.

We’re setting the minimum price of these featured shirts to 1,000 tokens and the maximum price to 10,000 tokens.

1,000 tokens is more expensive than the cheaper shirts we currently sell in the game store, but it is generally less expensive than the 5-star shirts with unique geometry and tie-ins to seasonal events & themes. We want creators to share in the success we've had selling avatar items, and a competitive price is a big part of helping make that happen.

This feels like the right amount to value the many hours our creators put into their work, and also keeps token prices within reason.

Our partnerships with creators and programs like Ink Inc have helped us understand better pricing for player made content - with Dorm Skins being the best example. We are continuing to listen to creator feedback and look at sales data to figure out how to make pricing work best for everyone.

By launching with a staff picked list, we will be able to manage how the marketplace starts off so we can grow trust among our creators and players. Just like with the moderation problem, we hope to learn what is working and what isn’t. Then we’ll gain the confidence to take it the next step - opening up the marketplace so players can buy directly from each other’s portfolios.

What’s Next?

Custom Shirts is the first step of a big plan to hand over content creation to our players. Over the next few months, we will learn a lot more about how to solve the 4 problems we talked about above. We’re also expecting to find new problems we haven’t even considered. How it all goes will inform what we ship next so we can keep learning and keep trust strong.

These are big problems that don’t have straightforward solutions. We can’t easily apply the same real world economy playbooks to a social gaming platform like Rec Room. We’re writing a new playbook as we pioneer trusted transactions in a player created game. It’s a daunting problem, but being on a frontier like this, defining what the marketplaces of the future will look like, is the reason why we joined the Econ Team.

Interested in joining us? We are hiring!
Econ Team Senior Software Engineer

Econ Software Engineer

Or take a look at other opportunities at Rec Room.

Showdown (Pt. 3)

Part 3: Game Design: Making Showdown look and sound AMAZING!

Art:

Once we got the design of the level feeling good it was time to make the map visually stunning with help from the Build Team and Art Team! Working under the direction of the Art Team, Sarsparilla Springs went from a concept and rough prototyped map to a town full of old Wild West architecture between the oak trees and desert rock of the chaparral. 

We used a mix of makerpen objects and assets created by the Art Team to fill in Showdown to make it look lived in. All the buildings were made with makerpen, along with the Scoreboard and interior decorations. The Art Team also helped in creating meshes for the train and weapons along with the terrain and tunnel system. We started with rough concept art and a hero image that we then used to guide the build team in building out the buildings, which you can see below!

The biggest challenge was how we successfully blended the assets made by the Art Team along with makerpen assets to create a world that matches the look and quality of past RROs. We’ll go more in depth with this in a future video coming to you super Soon™!

A lot of times the art and level design are happening at the same time. It was no exception here - in fact, working with the maker pen allowed us to continue to change and adjust level details all throughout the project.

One example of this would be the theater. It started as an orange box that we weren’t even going to be able to go into. As we built and the map evolved, though, it became the perfect place for our pre-game lobby. I remember the first time we roughly built out the theater balcony and we literally fell in love with that view of the town, so this is why it’s the first view of Showdown you get!

Sound:

So now we have the wonderful Wild West town of Sarsaparilla Springs where you can play 3v3 against your friends. The last key to fully bringing everything to life is sounds! 

With Showdown we wanted to really bring the world together with the sounds of the West, and the chaparral biome to be specific. There’s ambient sounds, music, and sfx playing throughout the whole map - I encourage you to walk around and listen to how the sounds change as you move throughout Sarsaparilla Springs.

You start in the theater with the piano playing and the sound of general ambience outside. As you walk around the map the distant sounds of eagles screeching and dry desert wind hit your ears. If you fall into the mine, everything instantly changes as you traverse the cold rocky caverns hearing rocks falling, a subtle echo, and maybe even a distant whisper.

All of this had to be created and added to the map to create what is called a soundscape. This is something that really helps bring a room to life. The easiest way to create a soundscape is to listen to whatever environment you are in - if you are outside you might hear a slight breeze with birds chirping and dogs distant barking, the quiet hum of an A/C unit, or even cars passing on the road. All of these sounds amount to a soundscape and make the environment you’re in feel more real.

Lastly, we had SFX and music. The music played during the game helps to get you in the Showdown mood. It also is an audible indicator of where the game is at - as you get towards the end of a Showdown round, the music starts to speed up. Using music as an audible indicator is a great way to supplement a visual cue happening in game. The SFX are everywhere on the map. We have the weapons of course and each one has a distinct character that we created with different reload and firing sounds. This is so you (and all the players around you) know what gun you’re firing and from where.

Sound is such an important part of the dev process and the sooner you can start to think about it and implement it into the maps you’re building, the better and more immersive they will be. Music also helps to create audible and emotional cues based on the type of music being played. I encourage all of you to try playing with sound in your rooms and also listen to Showdown and the other RROs on how the sound design is constructed. Good sound design will always be a huge plus to a room!

Thanks so much for reading our Showdown blog! We really hope y’all enjoyed it and took something away as well. This isn’t the end of behind-the-scenes looks though… keep your eyes peeled for more content coming your way before you can say “cowpoke”!

See ya real soon!

Showdown (Pt. 2)

Part 2: Game Design: Level Design, Systems = Fun!

Howdy and welcome back for the second of 3 parts to this Showdown series! Picking up where we left off last week, we’re gonna be talking about level design and the game systems. We’ve been watching feedback on Showdown the past week and looks like there’s tons of y’all out there yee’n and haw’n. A few cowpokes have been asking why the map is small and why it isn’t symmetrical, and while we mentioned a bit of that in the first blog, we talk about that more in depth in this one!

Level Design:

The town of Sasparilla Springs started off as a napkin sketch! As we began thinking about what ^Showdown would be we asked ourselves… what makes a good PvP map? How are we going to make something differentiated than our existing paintball and laser-tag maps that plays to the rock paper scissors concept of our weapon balancing?

The answer was to focus on team deathmatch exclusively over capture the flag. This opened up a few new avenues for us in the world of map mapping. 

1. We didn’t need to make a ‘sided’ map anymore. Asymmetric design could be our friend rather than foe. 

2. Approach avenues could be geared towards flanking and surprise over cover as you weren’t carrying a flag. 

3. We also wanted to add a cool interrupt into the game pace with the train. 

That napkin sketch quickly turned into an orthographic design which was refined a few times to bring down to a size that felt fast and furious.

A common inclination for map design is to go too big, especially for an arena shooter. We started a little too big with the map which wasn’t encouraging the speed and chaos we craved with Showdown. Games would take longer and the time to get a KO would be longer as well, so we shored up the perimeter and really focused on density. This led to shorter game times and we found players were hitting the 25 KO mark just around 4 minutes!

We knew that with the power of the makerpen we could quickly start getting a true feel for gameplay rather than designing on paper. Just a day or two into the project we were beyond paper and playing inside of our greybox map in Rec Room.

We quickly settled on a fairly cylindrical map with different, partially obstructed vertical layers. Players would be able to circumnavigate the map, but they’d need to either rise up or dip down through the 3 levels to do a full circumnavigation. We started to think carefully about cover and sightlines at this point as well.  

Sasparilla Springs is a series of 19th century mining town buildings, with accessible roofs, and tunnels below the town. We imagined a group of bandits escaping the jail, dynamiting their way into the bank, and escaping via train. This helped us frame where buildings might be placed relative to each other, and gave us a background for environmental storytelling as we built the map.

We also began to understand what weapons we’d be creating, and wanted the map to contain near, mid, and far combat zones to support our rock-paper-scissors style gameplay with the cork guns. This led us to carefully crafting our balconies and their sightlines so as to not overpower the center of the map with roof-top snipers. We also wanted to give revolver users a fighting chance in the tunnels and so a few longer underground sightlines means that it’s not always a sure win for shotgun users underground. 

Oh and hey, we figured we’d throw in some dynamic cover with the train just to mix things up mid-game. 

The collection of buildings, roofs, tunnels, and train lead to some really cool circular movement gameplay, where chaos can reign, and where organized teams can thrive if they work together, holding key buildings and angles on the map. 

Even with an organized team holding watch over the center of town, competing players still have many avenues of approach and attack by moving through the buildings and tunnels to sneak up behind high-ground holders or sniping them from far away.

Game Systems:

We won’t go into too much detail in this post about the systems since we will when we talk more in a later blog post about circuits, but once we had the foundation for our game we could focus on other systems to make the full game work. The main systems we used are:

• Game Manager - This was the main manager that told the game what state we were in. Pre Game, Intro Game, Game Start, Game End

• Scoreboard System - Kept track of all Hits and Outs by player, tallied them up, and showed on the scoreboard. It also was added to our variables for the leaderboard stats.

• Countdown timer System - Our 4 min timer that tracked how much of the game was left.

• Costume System - Costumes that are added to the players at the Game Intro to differentiate teams.

• Team System - The rest of the team system that splits all players into teams and notify what team you are on.

• KO Systems - Before de-spawning we need to notify you that you have been hit and show the classic KO skull over your head.

• Respawning Systems - Once you are KO’d this system drops your weapon, and de-spawns and respawns you to a new location with a fresh revolver in your hand.

• Audio System - Maintains and keeps track of all the audio on the map and when it should be playing.

• Train System - Controls the animation and Steam of the train coming onto the map

• Weapon Systems - The ability to pick up, drop, and swap weapons. Also we made it so you couldn’t dual wield the weapons in this game.

• UI Systems - All the buttons and visuals to tell the player information about the game. One cool new circuit allowed us to create an in-game HUD (Heads Up Display) To show Team hits, and the timer countdown while playing. No more having to look up at the scoreboard and getting hit!

Whew that’s a lot of systems! All of these systems working hard at once are what create a fun polished experience for the player to hop in and play ^Showdown with their friends! Even more is the thought and care put into each of these systems which we will talk about more in the next blog coming soon. Don’t miss it!

See ya real soon!

Showdown (Pt. 1)

Pt. 1: Game Design: Rules, loops, and mechanics oh my!!

Welcome to Sarsparilla Springs!

Howdy y’all, and welcome to the first of a three-part dev blog going into the detail of how we made Showdown, our most rootin’ tootin’ wildest PVP RRO experience yet!! 

In Showdown you play as the Lawful Deputies or the Nefarious Outlaws in a 4-minute PVP battle for the town of Sarsaparilla Springs! At your disposal are three new cork weapons created with new UGC circuits. In fact, the entire Showdown game was made with new UGC tools! Some have shipped alongside Showdown for you to use today along with other new tools we hope to put into the hands of our creators in the near future.

Let’s start from the beginning, why did we make Showdown? A few reasons!

• We wanted to create another Rec Room Original game that’s fun to play, brings friends together, and expands on the world of Rec Room.

• We wanted to create something that built on the success of our previous Rec Room Originals like paintball, but that was a little faster and streamlined. 

• And importantly, we wanted to do as much of this as we could with the makerpen and circuits, and where we couldn’t, develop new systems for our creators.

Showdown Design:

As with any game we’ve created it always starts with the Game Design Document (GDD). This is the blueprint from which the team uses to figure out how and what needs to be created to make Showdown work. It gives a detailed explanation of the many different aspects that go into creating a successful game.

Some Example Components:

• The Basic Rules - What you can and can’t do while playing the game

• The Game Loop - What is the basic action the player takes over and over that consists of the core mechanics of the game

• The Core Mechanics - These are the actual core actions that allow you to achieve the game loop

• Game Systems - The components of the game that will make it work that need to be made. These can be health systems, score systems, (and the most important - the root beer system!)

• Level Design - What does the map/level look like that you are playing from a basic design point of view

• Art  - What art is needed for the game? This can first be concepts but eventually 3d models, animations, root beer bottles, and even Maker Pen art in the case of Rec Room.

• Sound - What are the sounds and music you hear while playing your game? Are you hearing goats BAAAA at each other, does the cave echo when you’re walking through it?

Let’s break each one down further!

The Basic Game Rules:

Can’t make a game without first having some rules to follow! All games have rules that establish the limitations of what a player may or may not do while playing that game. It creates the foundation for which the game loop and mechanics can be added to create a smooth gaming experience. This is true for all games whether it’s a board game, sports game, or video game. For Showdown we had to create rules specific to PVP type games. Our rules are:

• 6 Player Deathmatch - 2 teams of 3 battling it out until the time runs out or the min. score is hit.

• Gameplay time - 4 minutes of wild west action

• Win Condition - first team to 25 points (or the most points after 4 minutes)

The other thing we really kept in mind was to stick to the rules of paintball. Showdown started as a reskin of paintball at first and then we continued to iterate from there creating the new weapons and systems that were unique to Showdown.

The Game Loop:

As mentioned earlier the Core Game Loop is the main action the player takes over and over and over in a game. It’s the game play in its simplest, purest form. Run, Jump, Score is the basic game play loop of Super Mario brothers and other platformers. 

In the case of Showdown we used the basic PVP game loop:

Players fight, pick up new weapons, get KO’d and respawn. 

This loops over and over and is controlled by our above game rules creating a much more solid game experience. The last piece is the Core Mechanics.

The Core Mechanics:

These are the actions carried out to achieve the game loop. They can be running, jumping, firing weapons of different types, which is the case for Showdown! 

We have 3 NEW cork weapons we are introducing: The Spinner, Blaster, and Repeater. We used the old paintball weapons as a starting point, but you can see they look juuuuuuuuust a little bit different now. You’ll also notice that the new cork guns have a bit more POP to them in the way they shoot and reload.

Maybe in the future we will have a sniper like in the above image! We wanted the cork weapons to be new in the feel and way they work yet still be connected to the paintball weapons of the past. A new mechanic with these weapons is that they auto-reload. The revolver has six shots, the shotgun 2, and the lever rifle 3 - 3 round bursts. After that they all reload for a short amount of time with stylized reload animations that really make the guns unique. This auto-reload system was added to make the game play fast, fun, and mobile friendly. It also adds an element of strategy when firing to keep track of your ammo, just like you had to in the old west. 

A key component of adding the new weapons was balancing them just right. For this we looked to an old kids game - Rock Paper Scissors. In Rock Paper Scissors you play with your hands making different hand gestures that represent either Rock, Paper, or Scissors. Each one loses to one and wins over the other.

Rock beats Scissors

Scissors beats Paper

Paper beats Rock

Using this idea we balanced our weapons the same way! In a cork battle between different weapons we balanced them to beat out their counterparts (most of the time).

Spinner beats Blaster

Blaster beats Repeater

Repeater beats Spinner

Keeping this in mind allowed us to create weapons that are balanced for closeup, mid, and long range gameplay so all players can use the weapons and gameplay style they are most comfortable playing. Whether you’re a gunslinging cowpoke who loves speed or a sharpshooter with a steady hand you’ll feel right at home in Showdown!

So folks, with these three components of the Game Design doc you now have the foundation of your game! From here we can start to build upon it with Level Design and the other game systems which we will talk about in the next blog post and how they start to create the “Fun Factor” for our game!

One last thing for y’all RR+ Early Access members - how many bandits can you cork? Rack up your KO’s before August 18th and we’ll showcase the sharpest shootin’ deputies n' bandits at the top of the Early Access leaderboard on our social media before it resets!

Until then see you in Sarsaparilla Springs, Partner!

Updating our Screens Controls

Let’s face it, Rec Room is a weird game! Players in Rec Room enjoy all kinds of special capabilities, and unless you’re playing in VR, the whole suite of controls can be challenging to wrap your head around. Over time we’ve seen that just learning and remembering the basic controls is a major point of friction for our players. This is especially true for new players, but we also get this feedback from players who have been with us for years. Does Rec Room really have to feel so weird to play if you’re not in VR? We don’t think so, so we’re getting ready to roll out a big update to controls on all of our Screens platforms.

The primary goal behind this work is to make Rec Room feel like it was made with your device of choice in mind. Whether you’re playing on a PC, console, or touch screen, we want to lower the “cognitive load” of controlling the game. With these changes, picking up and playing Rec Room should feel much more familiar and cozy, like pulling on a comfy sweater.

We appreciate all the feedback you’ve sent us about controls, and we’re excited to improve them. Our goals with this blog are to 1) give you all advanced notice that Screens controls changes are coming, 2) for creators, to show you how to mark up the tools in your room if dual-wielding is important to your experience, and 3) provide a chance for you all to give us feedback on further improvements in the coming weeks.

Check it out!

How it works

The new Default control scheme is designed to be the best way to play Rec Room! It has one button to interact with things, and one button to drop things. If you’ve played first-person games before, these controls should feel very familiar. Yes, it’s more approachable for new players, but it’s also just simpler, more intuitive, and ultimately more enjoyable for everybody.

Some cool features of the new Default control scheme:

• Right-click on mouse or use left trigger on gamepad to aim (hooray!)

• Quickly swap tools with one input, rather than having to drop them first

• Dedicated reload button (did anyone know manually reloading was even possible before?)

• Holster shortcuts on Keyboard & Touch

• Share Cam and Maker Pen shortcuts on Keyboard & Touch

“But wait, is the old control scheme going away?”

We understand that some players really do like the existing controls. Or maybe you're just used to how things work, and you’d really just prefer to go on playing  like you have. We get ya! For this reason, we are keeping the existing control scheme as a Legacy option, and this is what you’ll start out on if you’ve played Rec Room before. It’s a similar mapping to the old controls, so you keep playing how you’re used to if that’s what you want. Legacy still has fully ambidextrous capabilities, but won’t be compatible with some of the all-new features.

For those who have more specific controls preferences, stay tuned! We are also working on rebindable Screens controls that you can dial in to your specific liking!

How Default controls work

The Default controls have one button to interact, but that doesn’t mean they can only use one hand! Which hand an object will be held in is determined by the object itself. For example:

Most objects are held in the right hand automatically

Some objects like a Paint Grenade or a Shield are held in the left hand automatically

And some objects let you pick up one in each hand, such as Dodgeballs, Swords, some Pistols, and the Trigger Handle

Supporting the new Default controls in UGC

All objects come with a default preferred hand that we author, but you can customize it to suit your own room too! 

Note: these object settings are exclusively for the benefit of players on screens; these changes have no impact on VR players.

By configuring an object, you can set the Screen Player Preferred Hand. The only thing this setting affects is how Default Screens controls interact with the object, so set it however you want most players to experience your room. This won’t affect VR or other Screens control schemes.

• Dominant - Default controls will hold this in the Dominant hand (typically right)

• Offhand - Default controls will hold this in the Offhand (typically left)

• Dual Wield - Held in the Dominant hand, or hold two Dual Wield objects at once (note: cannot hold a Dual Wield + a Dominant object)

Here’s a couple examples of how you might configure the objects in your room:

The room uses a Sniper and a tiny little Sword as a sidearm. Swords are Dual Wield by default, but Sniper is Dominant - so Default controls cannot hold both at once. There are two easy solutions; either make the Sniper Dual Wield so that both objects can be picked up by either hand depending on the order they are grabbed, or mark the Sword as Offhand and leave the Sniper as-is so it is always in the Dominant hand.

This room is basically Capture-the-Flag but with only Grenades! By default, the Flag and Grenades are all Offhand which is not ideal when Grenades are the star of this show. But by setting Grenades to Dominant, they will go to the opposite hand of the Flag. Another option would be to set the Grenade as Dual Wield, so the first one goes to the right hand but you can easily pick up two at once.

“All right, so what’s next?”

For the vast majority of players, once we roll out these new controls, life will go on very much like it has. Existing users will be on Legacy controls, and be able to switch once we complete our rollout. We will start easing all new players on to the Default controls, and so over time we should see a gradual shift toward a greater percentage of players using the new Default controls rather than Legacy.

If you are the creator for a room where dual-wielding is important to your experience, you’ll have time when the update goes out to be able to mark up the tools in your room, and ensure that everything is ready for Default controls before we roll them out to everyone. We’re still fixing bugs and harvesting feedback, so we don’t have exact dates to share yet, but be ready for when we announce the update so you have time to prep if this change affects your rooms! We appreciate your patience, and thanks again for all of your feedback on controls so far. Rollout dates coming soon!

Ensuring “Be Excellent to Each Other”

You may have heard a bit about automatic voice moderation in the past, and we’re finally ready to start in-game trials today. So what’s going on here? Why are we doing this? And how will it affect you, as a player? 

Rec Room has really grown over the past year - from an influx of new VR players last Christmas, to all our new Xbox friends, and big bumps from being featured by Apple - and we need to ensure the moderation system will keep up with this growth. I’m sure many of you have had an experience in Rec Room that was not the best - people yelling racial slurs, making crude sexual advances, or telling others to kill themselves. Obviously, this is not the experience we want our players to have! While we would love it if everyone was excellent to each other immediately, sometimes this just doesn’t happen. We do tend to have a certain number of trolls join over time, so we need to make sure these people don’t ruin things for everyone else. 

Currently, almost all of our moderation actions are reviewed by staff - this won’t be sustainable in the long term! This worked well when we were a small population and could get through the number of reports relatively quickly. However, as the population grows, we’re finding that there’s longer wait times for reports to be reviewed, and bad actors can continue to bring negative effects to the community while these reports are being reviewed. This has been true even as we’ve added staff to the moderation team over the past year. Enter automation!

We’re partnering with Modulate.ai to trial ToxMod in the Rec Center this month, with plans to roll it out further as we refine our processes. So what does this look like for players? At first, you may not notice any big effects while we evaluate initial results from the partnership. We want to ensure that we’re targeting the behaviours we want to restrict - racism, homophobia and transphobia, sexually explicit language and harassing behaviour. I know there have been some concerns about swearing, but given that we’ve generally been tolerant of casual and non-abusive swearing - casual use will still be fine! There’s a big difference between “oh shit” and “you’re shit” in how it affects players around you. 

After our initial trial is complete and we’re happy with our processes, you might start to notice that the person yelling racial slurs quickly gets their mic muted, or the person making explicit sexual statements to everyone around them gets sent back to their dorm. We’ll be experimenting over time to see which consequences are most effective in reducing long-term behaviours that affect other players - after all, we do want Rec Room to be a place for everyone! We do believe some players just may not understand our Code of Conduct at first and can become positive members of our community. But we recognize that some players may be coming into our community with poor intentions, to disrupt or ruin other people’s experiences, and we may need to remove those people to ensure the experience remains good for everyone else. 

I know some players have privacy concerns around the new process. This is something we care a lot about! We want to assure you this has been top of mind for us while selecting a partner for this work and designing our processes. ToxMod acts like an extra in-game moderator for us; it reports things that violate our Code of Conduct, and only the data specific to that incident is used in reports. Chat data is not kept long-term and is deleted once its use is served, and we minimize the amount of data sent to Modulate for analysis as much as possible. We have also ensured that our partner had similar privacy policies to our own, so players can be comfortable knowing that their data is used only to improve our moderation system, and isn’t sold or traded to other parties. 

Hopefully this answers some of the questions and common concerns we’ve heard from the community. If not, feel free to comment below and let us know your thoughts! We’re excited to take these next steps towards a long-term, scalable moderation system.