Automated Voice Moderation in Rec Room

In September, we announced that we’re working on an automated voice moderation system to help our moderation team keep Rec Room fun and welcoming. As we get closer to making that system live, we wanted to give a brief overview of what we’re looking to achieve and what protections are in place for Rec Room players. 

Currently, we offer a number of moderation options in game for players to help us identify bad actors and manage their own experience. However, we’re working towards a future where speech that harasses or demeans others is dealt with in a very rapid manner in Rec Room, giving trolls less of an opportunity to offend large groups of people before they are removed from the game. 

Next week, we’re starting to test a system which will automatically flag speech that’s sexist, racist, discriminatory or contains violent harassing language. Rest assured, we’re targeting the worst of the worst behavior in Rec Room - you can still call your friend a butthead or yell “OH SHIT” when the red bats are closing in in Golden Trophy.  Still, there’s speech that everyone can agree violates Rec Room’s Code of Conduct, and that’s what we’re working to remove.

As we introduce these new systems, we want you to know that privacy is being given utmost consideration. We’ve worked to implement and integrate technologies where we can store the most minimal amounts of data, keep that data anonymized, and delete the data as soon as its purpose is served. These systems will be active in public rooms, so you can use private rooms to keep your conversations completely confidential.

Feel free to leave questions in the comments and we’ll try to answer them in the longer devblog coming next week!

Community Commerce Report

Another quarter has concluded and that means we have some commerce to look back on! Hello and welcome back to our third community commerce report of the year. As before, these reports will be going out once a quarter to give you, our wonderful creators and community members, a peek into our in-game economy to move you closer toward making a sustainable income building in Rec Room.

Each report will include some detail on the types of UGC creations that are selling well, the top grossing price points by category, as well as highlight a particular creator doing cool things in the space! We’ll also provide news about new and upcoming features we are adding to Rec Room in an effort to get you more $$$ while building the things you love. This time ‘round we will be focusing on a very exciting new feature we shipped during the quarter: room currencies!

But we’ll get to that...first let’s take a look at keys and inventions. 

Room Keys

As you probably know, room keys are one-time purchases that unlock something in the room forever. Some keys allow players to fly, other keys unlock special areas, and still others create novel ways to cooperate with other players in your party. 

In the last two quarters, we spent a good deal of time going through the most popular types of keys and well...things haven’t changed much at all this quarter. We still see Powers, Weapons and Role Modifiers taking the lion’s share of tokens.. (Feel free to look back at our Q1 and Q2 reports for additional information on the key market)

This quarter, we simply want to highlight the top grossing price points and specific keys that are bringing in lots of tokens for creators. Just like last time, we find that while low priced keys (10-50 tokens) move lots of units, they don’t even rank on the top grossing price points. 

Creators that are earning enough tokens to cash out are consistently pricing their keys above 300 tokens, monitoring the market to ensure they are competitive in the space, and above all, ensuring that the keys they offer are well worth the associated price points by unlocking richer, more varied and more FUN social/gaming experiences.

With that said, here are the top grossing key price points and specific keys in the last quarter: 

We find here that many of the top keys follow the trends of general popular item types in the space. Many of the keys here are powers that either unlock additional gameplay experiences, costumes/skins in a game (such as the prisoner uniform in Prison Life or Gun Packs in PVP maps) or role modifiers that allow you to fly in the room.

These charts don’t tell the whole story, however. While it’s helpful to understand the top grossing and selling keys, we need to understand how the sales per price point compare against the number of individual keys offered at that price point. Said another way, we need to understand the average gross token sales per key at every price point. This will help creators answer: ‘How many keys are priced at X tokens and how do their sales compare to other price points?’

With that context set let’s dive in. 

To begin, it’ll be helpful to answer just how many keys are on offer at each price point. While we won’t provide an exhaustive list, take a look below at the top 10 in the last quarter:

As you can see the keys priced at 10, 100, and 50 see over 2x the number of units in the market compared to the next most represented price point. 

Now let’s look at the top average gross token revenue per price point. A note here: given that creators can price in increments of 1 token, there are a vast number of potential price points in the keys market. Thus, for legibility we will be providing ranges of price points in the chart below: 

It’s helpful to note here the comparison between the two charts. Even though the 10, 50 and 100 tokens are the most represented in the market, they don’t bring in very much revenue per unit. Really this chart tells a similar story to the first one: To bring in meaningful tokens in service of cashing out real $, pricing higher is ‘key’ (get it...we are talking about keys?). 

But of course pricing is just one piece of the puzzle. Pricing higher will help enable you to cash out but it’s also important to ensure that you have an overall quality and varied experience in your rooms that will drive both new and repeat traffic and purchases.

Inventions 

How about inventions? As we’ve mentioned previously, Inventions are community-made items that can be anything from furniture or skins for your dorm to (new this quarter) full-body costumes! While there are still more tokens going toward keys, the market for inventions is rapidly growing and we are confident the growth will only continue as we add new features and invention types.

Let’s start by again looking at the highest grossing price points and inventions: 

Interestingly, here we find that while the top grossing price point is 100 tokens (our current invention minimum), virtually every single top grossing invention is a Dorm Skin priced around 450 tokens. Dorm skins continue to be by far our biggest category of invention and we can’t wait to unveil some new features in the near future that will take them to the next level! 

Next, let’s again take a look at the number of inventions in the market at each price point and the gross average revenue for each price point. 

First, here is a look at the top price points by number of inventions on offer: 

Interestingly, here we see that the 100 token price point has approximately 571% more inventions in the market compared to 200, the second most represented price point. 

This has strong implications for the first chart we showed. If you recall earlier on we saw that the 100 price point was the highest grossing price point in the market by a considerable margin. While that remains true, given there are so many more items at that price point we should again look at average gross sales per individual unit on the market to answer ‘how many tokens on average do inventions priced at X bring in?’ 

Well let’s take a look: 

Well...pricing at 100 tokens doesn’t seem so attractive after all. This chart shows that for items priced at 100 tokens on average only 2,310 tokens are earned per item. On the other hand we see a big jump as low as 250 tokens and a general sweet spot right around 500 tokens (typically what we see successful Dorm Skins priced at).

Full Body Costumes

Before moving on from inventions, we’d like to draw a bit of special attention to a new invention type that debuted this quarter: the Full-Body Skeleton costume. Full-body costumes are a new way for avatar expression in community rooms. They can range from the hilarious (a fully articulated spider performing parkour) to the straight up cool (the aforementioned full body skeleton) and make socializing, cooperating and competing in Rec Room that much richer. 

(full body costume by Ranenbauer)

But how to price them?

We thought it’d be helpful here to show the top selling inventions by units sold as a point of comparison: 

You’ll notice the most popular inventions chart looks quite different from the top grossing inventions. Looking at popularity, we find more variety in item types such as swords and even more full-body costumes. However, on the gross sales side (aside from one full-body costume) we find exclusively dorm skins.

This is because of the price points for each of these items. While full body costumes and non-dorm inventions tend to sell well, they are by and large, priced at the minimum 100 tokens. The only exception here is the full body skeleton costume which is priced at 200. Interestingly, this is the only costume that appears on both the top grossing and best selling list...something to consider when pricing your full-body invention (or any invention for that matter!)

Continuing on the note of price, we’ve heard from our creators that pricing inventions can be difficult and we are currently looking for ways to make this easier. One tip that we’ll offer is to compare your invention with the prices and tiers of RRO items. Would you consider your inventions a 3-star, 4-star, or maybe a 5-star? Once you have an idea there, look at the various price points for items in that tier and price accordingly. Also, if you want to raise your price but are afraid it may not be worth it, try adding more value (providing a variety of color/textures or adding animations) until you feel it’s worth the token investment. 

Room Currencies

Next, we want to highlight an awesome new feature that our economy team shipped last quarter called Room Currencies.

You know how you can only get that SciFi Bucket Skin by playing Laser Tag and earning Tickets? Well, Room Currencies are a new feature that allows Creators to make their own in-game currencies—similar to Laser Tag Tickets. Creators can give players currency for completing games or challenges and can lock items with keys that can then be purchased with that currency. Separately, Creators can also allow players to spend Rec Room tokens on their currency. 

While this is a new feature, we have seen some really interesting use cases for currencies. Let’s take a look at the room ColorBlockRR made by Reelix_. In this room, the description reads:  Try and be the last one standing! One color plate will be chosen, you must get to that plate before all the others fall! 

In this room, you earn a room currency called ‘coins’ for completing games and even more for winning them. With those currencies you can purchase full-body costumes, weapon skins and more! Take a look at a couple screenshots below to see how this looks in practice: 

Currently, creators don’t have the ability to incentivize repeat plays, game wins etc. with tokens, but this room uses room currency to motivate people to keep playing and to keep winning. Heck, I’ve personally played through the game a number of times trying to get the burger suit but keep falling to my death.

Anyway, this is just one great example of currencies. There are other great rooms out there just waiting to be discovered or created. Maybe YOU will create the next amazing experience using currencies!

Featured Creator - Ranenbauer!

Speaking of room currencies, this quarter we’d like to feature the work of the wonderful creator Ranenbauer! Ranenbauer has not only made consistently cool work in Rec Room, he is the creator of the wonderful Ink Incubator room: OffThePier. Check the room out for another novel use of currencies and read below to hear his thoughts on making content in Rec Room: 

‘When it comes to creating in Rec Room, I tend to put enjoyability and humor before visual details. While having super detailed builds is impressive in its own right, that can take up a lot of ink. I’d rather use the ink for more gameplay and features. I really enjoy building characters in Rec Room, and keeping them simple not only saves ink, but it feeds into an iconic cartoon-ish style. 

I believe the biggest reason my content performs well in-game is because I built up my following FIRST. A lot of people will try to earn tokens right away with only a few weeks or months of even being a rec room player, let alone having experience with the maker pen. Prior to the launch of player compensation, I had been building for almost 3 years, slowly gaining a following of about 30k subscribers at the time, and my content had ZERO paid content. I didn’t become big overnight. It takes time and dedication to improve. Now that I can earn tokens and money from my content, I prefer to keep the prices low, but not dirt-cheap. Payment should be an option, not a mandate, for a good experience. Having long-term customer loyalty is more important to me than maximizing short-term profits. 

Ultimately, my advice to players looking to become successful in Rec Room building would be, Never give up, and don’t rush things. It might be a year or more before you make it big, but it’ll never happen if you just stop trying. If you’re feeling burned out, or can’t think of anything to make, it’s okay to take a short break, but make sure to always come back!’

---

Thanks for those tips Ranenbauer! And thanks for all the wonderful and varied items, rooms and characters you bring to Rec Room. We look forward to what you build next!

Conclusion

Well, there you have it! We hope that if you are a creator or a player interested in building in Rec Room, this has been helpful and motivating. If you’d like us to go deeper on any of the topics in the report, comment below and we’ll take that into consideration for future quarters.

In addition to the stats here, did you know that you can now see some key stats of your own on RecNet? Simply log in and you’ll be able to see things like how many visits, subscriptions and shares are coming from each of your rooms as well as how many tokens you’ve earned through your creations!

Alternately, if you aren’t yet creating in Rec Room and you are interested in learning how, check out the litany of classes we offer over at the Creative Club. 

Finally, if you'd like to participate in programs that promote your work (such as the aforementioned Ink Incubator), stay up-to-date on econ features, or learn more about Community Commerce you can join the Ink Inc Discord or visit the Ink Inc Campus in-game!

Thanks and we’ll see you next quarter!

Maker Pen Workshop #2: Gourmet Garden

It’s important for us developers to stay on top of how all the UGC systems come together to make compelling content. We do this through multiple avenues, and one of them is Maker Pen Workshops!

Wait, what’s a Maker Pen Workshop again?

Maker Pen Workshop is the term we use to describe internal projects that push the bounds of the creative tools in Rec Room. With a Maker Pen Workshop, we dream up a game idea and then set out to make it using the Maker Pen. Along the way, we add new features to the in-game tools and improve the most frustrating parts of the workflow. In short, Maker Pen Workshop gives us a great way to be in-game creators and choose exciting new creative tools to add to Rec Room. This is different from an #RRO where we primarily use C# to build new experiences.  

Gourmet Garden 

The team working on Gourmet Garden was all really excited about making a game about growing crops, and more importantly, creating an experience you can come back to, and continue where you left off.

This is the elevator pitch for Gourmet Garden:

Gourmet Garden is a multiplayer gardening game where you and your friends will take care of your plants from planting the seed, all the way to harvest in a shared greenhouse. Your end goal is to harvest and sell enough plants to afford a mysterious seed that caught your eye in the market.

Concept art for the greenhouse

Projects

We identified several areas where we wanted to improve our UGC tools to meet the goals of the original game design.

• Unsynced Lights/Text

  • We wanted to display the only gold quantity that matters in our game. Yours.

• Set Position

  • Creating the contraption necessary to move all the crops around was out of the question both from an ink standpoint and an editing sanity standpoint. Adding the ability to set the position of arbitrary things was pivotal.

• Cloud Variables

  • This is how we were going to achieve any sort of saving with our game.

• Room notifications

  • We wanted to experiment with sending players notifications on their mobile devices when their plant finished growing.

Progress Pics

How It Started

How It Ended

Behind the scenes look at all the circuitry that makes the game work!

Learnings

The most important part about Maker Pen Workshops to us are the learnings that come out of them. We identified several major pain points while building and these are aspects we are actively looking to improve. We believe these pain points are not only limited to Gourmet Garden, but all the games you are all trying to make.

Ink/Heat Limits

This isn't a new problem by any means, but we really felt the pain here. Most of the room comments we have seen so far have been people asking for more areas to grow plants/upgrades/more kinds of plants which are all completely valid asks. We originally wanted to have three spots per player that could each have a plant, but we quickly ran out of ink/heat trying to manage just one for each player. The live version of the room currently sits at max ink, which means we're out of room to add new things. We can’t promise a timeline on when improvements here will be made, but know it's on our radar.

Dynamically Spawning Objects

Sort of related to the above point, but currently, in the room we needed to account for the worst case scenario which was any player in the room could be growing the same plant which means we needed three copies of each plant at edit time. If we take a step back, really the worst case should be three plants total. If we could have spawned plants as we needed them the ink for the room would have been drastically reduced.

X-Plat Interactions

Early on we really wanted to have a watering can that you could use to water your plants...If you’ve played, you could see that we instead landed on throwing water balloons at them. This was more using what we had instead of being an intentional decision. Two reasons we backed off from the watering can idea:

1. Not enough ink

2. We couldn’t get the interaction to feel good on all the platforms we support

In a world where we had infinite ink, we probably still would have gone with throwing water balloons because we really wanted the game to feel decent on screens platforms. This sparked some conversations around interactions in UGC, and how we could improve these all up. Something that touches on this problem, and is shipping soon, is the Trigger Handle. With the Trigger Handle, no matter which platform you are on, it’s used the same exact way. You can press the button you use to fire a paintball gun to fire CV2 events that are inside its object board. There is more to come in this area of the tools as there are many more problems to solve here!

CV2 Debugging/Comments

The live room sits at around 1800 chips total which is a lot! Whenever something went wrong in the room, the errors helped identify what the issue could be, but the issue was finding which chip was producing the error. We believe there are some low hanging fruit improvements here we can make like actively displaying on a chip itself that it produced an error, in addition to the error logged to the palette.

On a similar note, early on we had text components with information on how the circuits functioned which were very helpful. However, as time went on and we needed more ink we needed to remove all of our descriptive text which made it difficult to remember how the systems we built meshed together. 

CV2 Functions/Properties

Early on in CV2’s development, before it was even released from beta, we identified a really powerful part of the system that we are working towards. There are two parts to this, one of them is essentially having the ability to fire exec ports on boards without having physical access to the ports. There are many reasons you might want to do this, but a very common one would be if you’re expecting different objects that you don’t yet have, like with a trigger zone.

The other side of this is what we’d call “properties”. Take a point light for example. You can currently set the light’s intensity via the config menu or by using a very specific “Set Light Intensity” chip. Intensity is really just a float value, like any other float variable. We would like for values like this to both:

• Be accessible via a set of chips (Get/Set Property) with just a reference to the object that has those properties.

• Any variable chip has the ability to have it’s value bubbled up to the config menu just like the light intensity value (which should help a ton with invention usability)

Properties are a type of function which is why they are grouped together. We need functions before we can get properties.

Bugs

We encountered a number of bugs while actively building the room. Some of these we had logged in our bug tracking software, and others were brand new. We are actively working on fixing a bunch of bugs in the coming weeks. If you have any that are really hindering your building experience we would love to hear what they are, and how to reproduce them. Reach out to us on discord or leave a comment here if you have any!

Conclusion

These of course aren’t the only learnings we had, but more the broad strokes of where we had issues, and where we think improvements could help all creators create their dream rooms. We’re all very excited to see what creators make with the latest tools we’ve added with this Maker Pen Workshop. If you have an idea for what we could build for the next Maker Pen Workshop leave a comment below!

All About Cloud Data!

Hey readers! Today we’re going to talk about one of the newest features in our User-Generated Content ecosystem: Cloud Data Variables, which came out of beta this week! This is a huge step towards enabling our great Rec Room creators to create experiences with a greater sense of progression, replayability, and permanence.

This post is going to also dive into some bits of Circuits V2 terminology, and assumes you have some familiarity with Circuits V2 or have read The Circuits Handbook post from several months ago.

The Reason

Previously, creators have had two kinds of variables at their disposal: Instance and Synced variables. When using Instance variables, each player in the room has their own value for that variable. For example, if I had an Instance integer variable named Apples, my own value for it could be five, while another player’s is three. For Synced variables, all players in the room share the same value, and our networking system broadcasts any changes to the other players. Whenever a player leaves a room, the game no longer remembers any of the values that these two kinds of variables had. 

We want to help people build the kind of games that players come back to over and over again, and bigger games that let you travel from room to room as you explore different corners of a world. Saved data is a natural part of that! We’ve been watching some of the most ambitious creators wring every drop they could out of Leaderboards to let people save their progress, so providing an official way to track things like quest gold, XP, or which rooms a player has visited was a natural next step.

We started out with this core idea: Saving values in rooms. Knowing that we’ll eventually make a leaderboard V2, we came up with two very different angles that we could approach this from: saving values to room instances (and giving players a way to manage their saved room instances, sort of like a save file in a Minecraft world), or saving room values to each player in them. Weighing the pros and cons of each, we decided that we saw more potential use cases and a better user experience for the latter, and started designing what started out as “Per-Player Persistent Variables,” and what would eventually be called Cloud Data Variables.

The Method

When designing a new feature, we focus on defining what the goals are for adding it to the game. These usually go through several iterations, and after such we landed on a few key driving goals and non-goals:

Goals:

• Allow creators to build rooms with per-player data that persists between sessions and across subrooms

• Persistence is implemented as low level building blocks that are agnostic about scenario

• By default, players don’t have to think about loading their data (unless a room creator says so)

• MVP approach: start with a small system upon which we can build later

• Intuitive to use on room load (i.e. no weird timing issues with data becoming available)

  • Have data loaded by PlayerJoined event

• Doesn’t contribute to crashing on room load

• Avoid hammering the server with constant save requests

• Creators can tell at a glance when something is persistent

• Creators can see what persistent values exist in their room

Non-Goals:

• This is not an attempt to replace leaderboards - that will be a separate effort later

• We’re not solving things like “items persist across subrooms” directly, but instead giving creators the ability to do this themselves

Once we had gone through several iterations of those goals, dozens of rough sketches, and a ton of thought experiments, we were finally ready to start developing. One server engineer built the back-end, creating the databases needed to house both player save data and the data for each room to track their data across subrooms. A client engineer came through and then built up all of the in-game content, hooking into those saving and loading events and making sure that all of the data got properly piped through Circuits V2. The designer iterated with the UI team to go from the sketch that you see above, to the menu that’s in the game now.

After a couple months of hard work, iteration, testing, bug fixes, a beta release, and more bug fixes, we were finally ready to bring the feature out of beta!

The Result

Cloud Data Variables make it possible for creators to save the values of individual players for the next time they come back to the room. Once a variable is set to be a Cloud variable, at first it will behave just like an Instance variable; circuits can set the value just like any other Instance variable, and each player in the room will have their own personal value for it. The magic happens once the player leaves the room and comes back; when the player leaves the room, they will send up to the server a list of all of their values for variables in the room, and when they return to the room, they will load that list back up and put all the values in the right places. Let’s see what that looks like in action.

Here we’ve got a button that increments an integer variable. Every time the button is pressed, we increment the value by one, and send the user a notification about how many times they’ve pressed the button.

We also wanted it to be easy for creators to tell, at a glance, which of their variables are Cloud Data variables, so the variable will gain a small icon of a cloud in order to make it easy to tell without having to go into the config menu.

With Cloud Variables, we can now store this number, and know that when the player comes back to this room, their value will start at what it last was. There are so many exciting ways that creators can use these values: logging how much time you’ve spent in a particular hangout room, opponents knocked out in a PvP map, enemies defeated in a quest, and so many more that we haven’t thought of, but you will!

But that’s not all! Creators have been asking us for a way to share values like this across different subrooms, and these Cloud Data Variables do exactly that. When you create a new Cloud Data Variable, it not only gets defined for the current subroom that you are in, but it can be used across all the subrooms of your room. With our example above, that means that we can read out the number of times the button has been pressed in a different subroom!

In order to keep track of all the places that you are currently using a Cloud Data Variable, we even have this new handy-dandy settings page that you can access to manage your data!

This menu gives you a quick way to see where all of your Cloud Data Variables are currently in use. If you’re no longer using one of the variables in any of your subrooms, you’ll be given the option to delete it, clearing up space towards your limit of Cloud Data Variables for the whole room. If the variable is still in use, you can also Reset the variable. This will invalidate all existing data for that variable name, completely wiping all the data for all users of the room. Use these tools with care!

If you want to check out what it feels like to play in a room that uses Cloud Data Variables, check out ^GourmetGarden, which was built on top of this tech in order to allow you to plant your seeds, leave, and come back to progress having happened while you were away!

There are some limitations on Cloud Data Variables though. In particular, you can only use them for the same types that can currently be Sync Variables: booleans, floats, integers, quaternions, strings, and vector3. In addition, we ran into some interesting technical limitations on the Circuits V2 side; because of how we had built our previous systems for Variables and Circuit Boards, we realized during testing that there were a handful of bad states that you could get into by placing Cloud Data Variables inside of Circuit Boards, and had to limit Cloud Data Variables to only be used at the room level for now.

I’m so excited to release this new tool to all of you, and even more excited to see and experience what you build with them!

Community Commerce Report Q2 2021

Hello and welcome back to the second edition of our Community Commerce Report! These reports will be going out once a quarter to give you, our wonderful creators and community members, a peek into our in-game economy to move you closer toward making a sustainable income building in Rec Room.

Each quarter we’d like to give you insight into the types of keys and inventions that are selling well, the price points that are most profitable by category, as well as highlight a particular creator doing cool things in the space! We’ll also provide news about upcoming features we are adding to Rec Room in an effort to get you more $$$ while building the things you love.

With that said, let’s dive into room keys and inventions!

Room Keys

As you probably know, room keys are special items in community rooms that unlock some functionality within the room. Some keys allow players to fly, other keys unlock special areas, and still others create novel ways to cooperate with other players in your party. 

Keys remain the largest category of spend in our community economy and continue to grow and grow, accounting for hundreds of millions of tokens making their way into the hands of creators each quarter. With that said, here is a look at the market over the last quarter (between April 5th and July 5th).

Once again, in breaking this down, please understand that not all users tag or title their keys to accurately reflect the above categories. Thus, while these general findings hold true, there may be a minor variance between actual numbers and those reflected above.

For the most part, things are relatively unchanged from the previous quarter. Powers that unlock special abilities in the room continue to be the largest category, followed by Role Modifiers which allow players to do things like fly in room. However, there are a few changes worth digging into:

• Donations, while still a relatively small slice of the umm...pie have doubled as a % this quarter. If you are a creator struggling to or not interested in monetizing your room, consider adding in a donation key or two. Our players love to show support for rooms they and their friends enjoy, and this is a great (and easy) way to do so!

• Access keys went from 10% of total spend to 5.5%. These are keys that allow players to enter special paid areas or experiences within rooms.

• Toys, virtually absent from last quarter, have grown this quarter to eclipse donations and nearly match Access keys. Toys can range from plushies that you can play with in the room to working RC cars to...uh signs? We aren’t exactly sure what to do with those but hey, they’re toys, the only limit is your imagination! See below for a wonderful assortment of toy keys available within PartyVenue:

While it is great to see so many players cashing in on Power and Role keys, we’d love to encourage our creator base to think of out-of-the-box ways for players to engage with room keys to unlock richer, personalized and more collaborative experiences for individual players and parties alike. Perhaps these keys unlock additional story-based content in rooms, perhaps they can unlock background/making-of content, or perhaps they can be shared with other friends and players in the rooms to create a more socially engaging experience. The only limit is your imagination! Oh wait, did we already say that? 

Inventions

How about inventions? Inventions are community-made items that can be anything from furniture or skins for your dorm, to working PCs with playable games! While the invention market is not as robust as that of keys, it has also been steadily growing over the past year. Today, tens of millions are being spent on inventions each month and more and more creators are publishing inventions daily. In fact, we’ve seen some pretty dramatic growth in the quantity and quality of inventions submitted to the store over the past quarter and we can’t wait to see what our creators continue to dream up with Circuits V2. 

With that said, here is the market for inventions by tokens spent between April 5th and July 5th 2021: 

Just like last quarter, Dorm Skins take a commanding share of all tokens spent on inventions. In fact, the numbers have really not changed at all since the beginning of 2021. The dorm is essentially the player’s virtual home in Rec Room and there is a clear appetite for interior design in that space. During this quarter we saw nearly 40 million tokens spent on dorm skins alone!

Featured Creator - Peanut!

Speaking of dorm skins, this quarter we’d like to feature the work of the wonderful creator ‘Peanut’. 

Peanut is very active in the community, creating not just dorm skins but furniture items, outfits, plushies and more. In the last quarter alone, Peanut made over 3 MILLION tokens on just three very popular dorm skins: the Elite Gaming Dorm, the Modern Loft and the Cozy Log 2 Story skins. 

But don’t just take it from us, here’s some great tips of the trade direct from Peanut herself: 

‘My tips for premium inventions would be to aim for whatever invention creates the most sales. For example, weapon skins and dorm rooms. Then I would recommend looking for references, a place to start before you make something of your own invention. Try to stay original especially from the already created items in the store so your inventions catch the eye of other players and bring something new to the table. Once you've created your invention, pricing is very important when it comes to making a decent profit from your work. Higher prices result in higher profits and usually don't dwindle your sales. Pricings between 200-600 tokens are generally good prices depending on your invention. If your invention is high quality players will purchase it despite high prices. 

Modern Loft Dorm by Peanut

Once you've set a price, promotion is the next step to making a profit. Either submitting a form in the Ink Inc Recroom discord for a featured invention, or a form for the invention tower themes can help promote your work and significantly increase your sales. Within a week you should begin to see your profits pour in and these tokens could translate into over $400 a month if you use the creator compensation program which translates 1 million tokens into $400 without promotional events. You can cash out well over 1 million tokens a month too with Recroom's creator compensation program. Keep in mind these are benefits exclusively for recroom plus members, but the $8 investment for recroom plus is well worth your potential profits.

Thanks for those tips Peanut! And thanks for all the wonderful and varied items you bring to Rec Room. While there is something to be said for focusing on a particular style or type of content, Peanut shows that branching out and making high quality items for a broad audience can be a valid path toward making a living building in Rec Room.

Speaking of that, you might be wondering what types of dorm skins are most successful in Rec Room. Below is a breakdown of the general types of skins we see in the top 20 skins sold. Together, these 20 dorm skins alone accounted for over 20 million in tokens!

Interestingly, we see about a 60/40 split between those tech/gaming focused dorms (gaming and sci-fi skins) and more interior design oriented dorms (modern/rustic styling). Consider making (or purchasing) your own gamer paradise or modern loft retreat!

Top Price Points For Keys

Turning our attention back to keys, we’d like to once again display the top price points across all our keys so you can better understand what prices are successful in the marketplace. Below is a look at the most profitable price points for keys this last quarter:

Again, the top price point is 500 tokens, however, notice that nearly 20 million tokens came in from keys priced at 10,000 tokens! These keys included the hacker ninja and bl sword keys from the popular QuestOfNinja room. 

It may be tempting to price at the 10-20 token price points and players will certainly buy your wares as evidenced by the chart below (the raw number of transactions by price)

But...if you are a creator looking to cash out consider pricing your keys in the 100-1,000 range. There were less than 1% of total sales events for the 10,000 price point as the 10-20 tokens, yet it was more than TWICE as profitable in terms of tokens spent.

If you are looking to cash out and the quality is there, our players are certainly ready to support you at those higher price points!

Room Currencies

Finally, we’d like to introduce a new feature that’s currently in beta and will be rolling out more widely over the next couple months called Room Currencies.

You know how you can only get that SciFi Bucket Skin by playing Laser Tag and earning Tickets? Well, Room Currencies are a new feature that allows Creators to make their own in-game currencies—similar to Laser Tag Tickets. Creators can give players currency for completing games or challenges and can lock items with keys that can then be purchased with that currency. Separately, Creators can also allow players to spend Rec Room tokens on their currency. 

It’s an entirely new way to motivate players to play in your rooms and we can’t wait to see how you all use them!

Conclusion

Well, there you have it! We hope that if you are a creator or a player interested in contributing to Rec Room, this has been a helpful read. 

In addition to the stats here, did you know that you can now see some key stats of your own on RecNet? Simply log in and you’ll be able to see things like how many visits, subscriptions and shares are coming from each of your rooms as well as how many tokens you’ve earned through your creations!

Alternately, if you aren’t yet creating in Rec Room and you are interested in learning how, check out the litany of classes we offer over at the Creative Club. 

Finally, if you want to submit an invention to be featured feel free to join the Ink Inc Discord or visit the Ink Inc Campus in-game!

Thanks and we’ll see you next quarter!

A Real Pane in the Glass

Glass!

Glass is something we’ve talked about a whole lot over the years. It’s been one of the most consistent requests from creators, brought up in every Q&A, and is something we’ve wished for on the team as well. We’re super excited to finally give our creators an easy and fully-supported way to make windows and water and more, without a giant martini glass or hacky strings of CSS.

For more info on how to use the new glass prop, check out:

We put a lot of love into this little cube, and we can’t wait to see what you make with it! But I know glass has been a long time coming, and it looks a little different than what we said we were shooting for, so I wanted to talk a little bit about why we’ve made the decisions we have, and what we hope for in the future.  

Under the hood

We’re doing a little bit of movie magic here to make sure the glass looks nice and shiny everywhere. Some of our base rooms have lush, detailed reflection information built into them from their RRO days...and some of them don’t, because we don’t know what you’re going to build! But a reflective material only looks as nice as what it’s reflecting, so the glass was looking pretty flat in the Maker Room at first. 

We don’t want a reflection that’s blatantly fake - but we don’t want it to be empty, either. So as part of our fancy shader, we’re piping in a little bit of nonsense data that will mix with the colors from the SkyDome chip in the Maker Room. Just enough noise to give it some gleam! 

Accurate reflection, and fake, respectively!

Why isn’t it a material?

We’ve had a lot of people ask us for glass as a material, and in fact that was our initial approach! Unfortunately, we ran into some issues with it.

When we were talking about glass last fall, we were also exploring ways to make our maker pen geometry render faster. We had high hopes for this work, and among other things, we were trying to solve one of the most pernicious problems with transparent shapes: sort order. (Bet you thought I was going to say performance!)

Roughly speaking, objects are drawn each frame in order from furthest away to nearest, based on their center, so that you see closer objects “in front.” Thanks to some shader magic, merging a bunch of maker pen shapes into one shape container makes them all count as one object for this purpose. That’s why it saves you ink! 

Drawing things from back to front isn’t always perfect, especially with really big objects. Let’s say you’ve got a house that’s been merged into one shape container, and you make a little table to go inside it. For most of the places inside that house, the center of the house is closer to you than the center of the table. If the “further away” table rendered first, and the “closer” house rendered on top of it, you wouldn’t see the table at all. It might flicker in and out depending on where you walked. The results would be weird and really obviously wrong! 

For opaque objects, there’s a “depth buffer” to make sure that if half of an object is hidden by something else, the stuff that’s hidden doesn’t get drawn, no matter which object is actually closer to you. This depth data means that it doesn’t really matter what order things get drawn in, except for optimization. 

However, you can’t use this for transparent objects. They have to be drawn back-to-front or they look wrong - since you can see through them, there’s no faking it with a depth buffer. We found ourselves in the situation of having a house with glass windows, with a glass table inside it, and being unable to ensure that they’d draw in the right order.

There are ways to solve this, but unfortunately, we haven’t found a solution yet that runs well on all of our platforms. We aren’t finished exploring rendering options, but it’s a long term effort, and it became clear that waiting would mean you guys had to go much longer without glass. And we really wanted to get you something fun and useful sooner than that! 

What’s next for glass?

A real glass material is still on our wishlist! We’re also starting to discuss ways to let creators set up custom reflection information for their rooms, which will improve the accuracy of glass reflections and metallic surfaces, and generally make all of the lighting look nicer. We hope to continue to make glass more expressive, and to that end, expanded configuration options are coming very soon to let you enable decoration mode and remove the collision. And if you have any other glass-related requests, we would love to hear them!

Audio FX zones!

But wait, there’s even more! Also introducing: Audio FX Zones! A resizable gadget that modifies sound within its invisible volume. 

One of the delights we’ve had in creating Rec Room quests is the environmental storytelling we get to do. Sound plays a critical role in immersing you in these rooms. We wanted to give you the same power to bring players into special audio environments in your rooms, like how we take you into space in ‘The Rise of JumboTron’ or take you underwater in ‘The Isle of Lost Skulls’.

You now have the ability to make a great throne room with heavy echoes, or a misty field with muffled sounds, or a partially flooded submarine where you move in and out of underwater sections and metal corridors with creepy reverb. 

To enable this, we’ve included our first implementation of Audio FX zones. Using the maker pen you can find Audio FX Zones in the ‘gadgets’ and then ‘other gadgets’ section. One of our use cases for the Audio FX Zones has been to let you tell the story of a complex place through how it sounds, which means you need lots of capability with the shape of the volume.

You can use all of your regular tools to scale, move, and rotate volumes to fit most spaces. We’ve also added in the ability to make spherical Audio FX zones so you can fit curved spaces as well.

Sometimes, you’ll find yourself overlapping these zones, which is why we’ve also included a priority section. This will let you set some zones to higher priorities, so in case you’re standing in an overlap, you’ll hear the effects of that zone, over others. 

We’re excited to see how you use the different effects, and want to hear what you’d like next! 

Learn how to add extra character to your rooms with audio effects by watching a quick tutorial here!

As always, thanks for playing!

Rec Room on Xbox!

We’ve teased it, we’ve talked about it in AMAs… 

Today Rec Room is launching on Xbox! Please join us in welcoming a whole new group of players, family, and friends to the Rec Room universe 🌌 We’ve got a few events and surprises that should make the launch even more exciting: 

When you invite an Xbox player to try out Rec Room using your Friend Code you’ll both earn a free bottle of bubbly at the end of the event! 

We also built an awesome ^WelcomeXbox room where everyone (all platforms) can visit to meet all of the new players and earn a new limited time gift drop - the Space Soldier Helmet! Xbox players can also earn the gift drop by visiting the Rec Center. Be sure to visit the room before December 17th to grab the limited time gift drop! 

Bringing Rec Room to Xbox has been a ton of hard work and we couldn’t be prouder of the folks that made this happen. For us, Rec Room has always been about creating a fun and welcoming community for as many people as possible. That means making Rec Room the best place for you and your friends to hang out, regardless of location or device. 

Please help us welcome all of the new Xbox players in whatever way best suits your personality. If you’re a quest fanatic, party up with some Xbox players and show them the ropes on your favorite quest. If you’re a paintball fan show them your favorite map. If you’ve got a favorite batch of custom rooms, give them a tour! 

If you see players hitting any issues or having questions about Rec Room remember to let them know about our HappyFox support site. From there they can browse the knowledgebase or get in touch with the support team via a new ticket. We also have a very helpful and active player community on our discord for any quick questions.

New players can also find a lot of How To videos on our YouTube Channel or answered questions on our subreddit. You can find links to both of those and all of our other social channels and tutorials here. 

And a reminder for all players that your Rec Room account allows you to log into Rec Room across ALL supported devices! Your login works across everything: iPhone, iPad, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Steam, and Oculus. Every time we launch on a new platform we see a big wave of excitement hit the community as more people are able to have their first Rec Room experience. The community has been awesome at welcoming new players in each time this happens and we just want to say a huge thank you to everyone for that in the past and for all of that help going forward. Cheers! 

PS. If you capture a great Rec Room photo or video moment be sure to share it with us by tagging us in your post or using the #RecRoom tag. You can find us at:

@RecRoom on TikTok

@RecRoom on Instagram

@RecRoom on Twitter

Rec Room on YouTube