This week we’re covering a small (but useful!) new feature in Rec Room, Link Buttons! This is another part of the “audience connection” initiative — a collection of features which help increase communication and visibility between creators and their audiences
Why Link Buttons?
Link buttons will help make this notice board in ^TheGiant interactive!
Blocked out spaces for Link Buttons in ^CreatorHub
We’ve seen many examples of creators highlighting interesting content in their rooms. Often this is accomplished using in-world text, although this means that players have to manually search for called-out content in the UI. This is time-consuming and we wanted to help make this process easier.
Our solution is Link Buttons, a new type of spawnable object that can be placed in-world and configured to open many different types of UI screens. We’ve seen in the past that features which are hidden within the UI (Looking at you, room cheers!) often get overlooked by players, and by providing intuitive in-world shortcuts we can help increase visibility and usage. The idea behind Link Buttons is the same, they should help make it easier to show off cool Rec Room content to your players!
Get Linking!
To use link buttons, you’ll first need to find them in your maker pen palette. They’re categorized as dynamic props.
Once a button is placed, you can configure it using the configure tool on your maker pen.
In the configure menu, you can select the type of link button you’d like to create and search for the specific content target to link to.
Once you’ve picked a target, your link button will change to display an icon depending on the link type and show the name of the target you’ve selected.
When users press the button it will take them to the appropriate UI screen and show details about your link target.
If anything ever happens that invalidates your link (e.x. an event expires, a published room is unpublished, etc), the link button will show a “missing” label to show that the link is broken.
What’s Next?
Link buttons can help creators show existing content to their audiences but we still don’t provide many in-game methods for creator-to-audience communication. Future projects will focus on giving creators new and more powerful ways of reaching out to their audiences whether it be to notify them of new creations or just to say “hi”.
As always, let us know if you have ideas for how you’d like to better communicate with your audiences or with the creators you follow! We’ll be updating this blog again soon - next topic will be on our experiments with improving the social expressiveness of our non-VR players ;) As always, give it your Rec Room best!