Note: this is part 3 of a 4-part series on Tomb Heist that started with costumes++ and continued with AI features.
It’s been a while, but just to recap what Tomb Heist! is all about:
Tomb Heist! is the name of the current Maker Pen Experiment we are building internally at Rec Room using only the maker pen. At the end of the project, this would not be released as an #RRO, but rather a community room. As we build it, we’ll be creating and releasing new creative tools.
In the coming months, we will be making improvements to rec.net centered around creators. Specifically, we want to make it easy for you to showcase all of your Rec Room creativity. We want to allow you to transform your rec.net profile into a full-fledged creator portfolio, akin to other creative portfolio websites such as artstation.com. For creators with a lot of content, we also want to make it possible for you to choose what content visitors see first on your profile.
To focus the Circuits V2 efforts in the Tomb Heist! Project we decided we wanted the AIs in this mini quest to behave fundamentally different from the regular AIs that we have in the rest of our RRO quests. We wanted to use existing enemies that players could already spawn in their rooms, but have them do something beyond just rushing at players and attacking blindly. We wanted them to be more akin to tactical adventure games like Metal Gear or Tomb Raider, but most importantly, all the new behavior had to be completely done in Circuits V2.
The line between playing and creating in Rec Room is often blurry, something that we think makes us special as a user-generated content platform. Becoming a creator is as easy as taking out your Maker Pen and drawing some new shapes or placing new inventions. However, managing your created content can get a little messy. You can find your rooms in your watch menu, but you can’t view your inventions unless you’re holding your Maker Pen. If you are a creator with a large number of published rooms, it can be a hassle to find the one you want to work on without sifting through all of them. You can see other players' rooms and inventions in their player details, but you can’t see your creations from your profile. As part of our Audience Connection work, we wanted to greatly simplify the work of viewing a player’s created content and offer easier methods of sorting and searching through it.
When we launched Rec Room in 2016, it was a VR-only experience. And one of the coolest things about VR was - and still is - the feeling of social presence that you get. As Rec Room has grown over the years, we’ve welcomed many players on non-VR devices as well - players on consoles, phones, and PCs are playing, creating, and hanging out.
A long time ago, in a Rec Room far far away, when Sandbox Machines roamed custom rooms, the first version of Circuits was conceived. We wanted a way for players to add logic to their rooms, a way to allow rooms to be dynamic, more alive, and hopefully, more fun. Thus, Circuits were born, the “logic” system in Rec Room, used to drive everything from game rules, to player spawning, to Gizmos and sound effects…
Today we want to talk about the Selling Inventions Beta we just kicked off, and the other features we’re planning that will enable players to earn more tokens. We’ll get into what’s going on now, what we’re planning Kinda SoonTM (in the next 1-3 months), and what we’re excited about in the longer term. As with everything we do, we want to remain flexible here to adapt to how you are using the features, so the farther out the planning gets the looser it gets.
Last week we released a new feature called Room Comments, and this week we wanted to take a deep dive into why and what this means for Rec Room.
We thrive off of community feedback at Rec Room and we want to give creators a chance to engage in deeper collaboration within their communities. Internally we’ve talked about this as “audience connection” - we want creators to feel as connected to their audiences as we feel to our player community...
And we’re back! Our second edition of the developer blog gives you a sneak peak at our roadmap for creator-facing features. We have some powerful new tools for creators in the pipeline, and we’re excited to share a little bit of our plan. Creator tools aren’t the only thing we have cooking, it’s just our focus for today. Other plans will have to wait for their own time to shine [|=)]
Hey folks and welcome to the inaugural developer blog post from Rec Room! The dev team wanted the opportunity to talk about some of the technical and design challenges we face. We’ve heard that many of you are interested in having more info about the Rec Room development process and this is our chance to give you a peak behind the curtain. We’re going to be putting these out about once a month, in parallel with feature releases.
And now without further ado, the first of hopefully many topics, Room Playlists!
