This week we’re covering a recent upgrade to the costume dummy, and a peek at our creative tool development plans AKA, the Maker Pen Workshop.
Maker Pen Workshop
The Maker Pen Workshop is the new term we're using 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 our 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 Unity and C# to build new experiences.
You might remember ^CapturePoint from a while back. At the time, we saw an opportunity to make creating structured games in Rec Room a much simpler process with the addition of the Game Rules chip. This process involved using the tools we expose to you to create a fun experience instead of Unity. The process for all Maker Pen Workshops going forward is going to be very similar to the ^CapturePoint release with some tweaks. The general idea here is that if we use the same tools you do to build something, we’ll better understand your workflows and be able to improve them more quickly! Some improvements that we got out of the internal feedback while making ^CapturePoint were Handles (like you see on the move, rotate, and scale tools), bubble select, and magnetic wiring to name a few. Having a specific building scenario is an important part of this process because we have context for adding new features, and improving the tools. This brings us to… Tomb Heist!
Tomb Heist!
Tomb Heist! is the name of the current Maker Pen Workshop 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 room that either Ry-Guy or Meriesa publish as a community room. As we build it, we’ll be creating and releasing new creative tools that you can start using in your own rooms.
This is the elevator pitch for Tomb Heist!
Tomb Heist! is a short, two player co-op experience that emphasizes stealth, and team play. This heist takes place in a long lost tomb hidden away in the depths of the jungle. The goal is to break in, steal the magic idol, and escape. Each player has a purpose in this heist, and you will need both to pull it off. This quest will take place entirely indoors.
This project is aimed at enhancing the overall quest building experience by adding some new tools and enhancing a lot of the building blocks we have currently... like costumes!
Costumes++
Since the costume dummy was first released, we have seen some amazing costumes from the community - but we’ve also heard ambitious creators asking for more functionality. While there's a bunch of things we could do for costumes to improve them, we picked a few features to target looking through the lens of Tomb Heist!
The design for Tomb Heist! requires two distinct characters with unique capabilities. A great way to bring these characters to life is to use costume dummies to give each one a unique look.
The costumes for Tomb Heist!
Meriesa spent about 5 minutes making these rockin’ costumes, but thinking through how we want this quest-like experience to go, making players use the equip UI to drive this experience is both unreliable and prone to user error. Rooms such as ^WarOfTheLions, ^PayloadPvP, and ^CrisisLegends are all amazing experiences, but all of the builders faced similar issues when trying to tie gameplay to their costumes. One of the main goals of this project is to give costume dummies circuit pins to drive their functionality to accomplish this.
The above gif shows off using the Player Event chip’s Player Joined pin to equip the costume as soon as I enter the room. Then I use two buttons hooked up to the reset and equip pins to drive wearing the costume and taking it off.
We added an “Equip To Player ID” pin as well as a reset pin. With both of these, you can freely equip/unequip costumes using many methods via circuits. In Tomb Heist! a big win we saw is going from the lobby to the first level automatically assigns the costume upon entering via the Player Joined pin off the Player Event Chip, creating a seamless experience.
Another thing we wanted to do to further differentiate these characters is change move speed, and other role settings to make them feel different. In this quest, we have the larger character moving slower, but can pick up heavy things like rocks, while the nimble character can move a lot quicker. Roles are definitely the way to go here, but hooking up a costume to a specific role is somewhat annoying to set up, so we have included a way to configure adding a role to the player who has the costume equipped, as well as removing that role easily when the costume is taken off. All of this is done through the configure menu.
Some of the new config options added to the Costume Dummy. Note, you can choose to add multiple roles or hide multiple outfit item categories.
We have been testing this feature a lot internally and it’s been fantastic to see how much more streamlined the building process is, and how much better the experience is for your players.
Future Of Tomb Heist!
Costumes++ is just one of the projects associated with this larger effort over the next couple months. In addition to costumes enhancements, another area we are focusing on is the addition of new AI features like setting up your own paths for them to follow. You can learn more about those features here. You can expect to see more additions to the tools that push on features to make Tomb Heist! behave more like one of our RRO quests… but we can talk about those another day [|=)].
As always, we appreciate your feedback as we continue developing the creative tools, so please let us know if there are things you need to build your creations. See you on the Discord, Canny, etc. and shortly in our next blog post about more creator tools!