It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your inventions are?
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.
Introducing, Portfolios!
The solution we came up with is the Portfolio Screen. Portfolios are created in our new UI system and act as a central location for all content related to a player.
Find other players' portfolios through a link on their details screen.
You can view all of a creator’s published content in their portfolio.
Find your portfolio through a link on your profile screen.
You can view all of your published and unpublished content in your portfolio.
For the first iteration of portfolios, we display:
Rooms that you own or co-own
Inventions you’ve created
Clubs you’ve created
Subscribers
You will see both published and unpublished rooms and inventions on your own portfolio but, don’t worry, other players will only see your published work.
Something that’s coming very soon is the ability to dig into any of the scrolling lists of content on the portfolio page and search or sort through it. We’re introducing a new UI convention to help with this. Whenever you see a UI stripe with a magnifying glass next to the title, you’ll be able to click either the icon or the title text to show a searchable grid of the same content.
There’s one other type of content we display on portfolios: Creator Announcements. What are creator announcements, you ask?
Creators need a voice!
Previously, you didn’t have many ways to communicate with your subscribers. We automatically created notifications for your subscribers whenever you published a new room, which was useful but kind of boring. Also, while you could notify your subscribers of new rooms, inventions were ignored completely, meaning that you were forced to look outside of Rec Room to promote your inventions. As a creator, your style is what sets you apart and it is high time that we give creators a voice.
Build it, Announce it
Our solution is Creator Announcements. If you’re familiar with the recent Club Announcements feature, you’ll feel right at home with Creator Announcements. At any time, you can go to your Portfolio screen to create, edit, or delete your announcements. Your subscribers will be notified whenever you create new announcements through a badge on the People button on the home screen. From here they can view a list of all of their subscriptions and see which ones have unread announcements.
A new subscription tab shows a badge when creators you’ve subscribed to have new announcements.
You can view all of your subscriptions by clicking the subscriptions link. From here you can search for specific creators and click on their images to see their portfolios.
You can create general announcements that contain a title, body text, and an optional image but we also wanted to help you notify your subscribers whenever you create new content. Gone are the bland room notifications of the past – now you will be prompted to create a custom announcement whenever you publish a new room or invention. If you don’t want to take the time to enter a custom message, we still provide you with a default one but feel free to customize the new announcements to your heart's content. When your subscribers view your new room or invention announcements, they’ll also see an action button with the option to visit your room or download your invention.
You’ll be prompted to enter a custom room published announcement when publishing a room.
New room (and invention) announcements will contain default text and an image that you can customize or send as-is!
Players can view your announcement later and follow a link to your newly published room.
What’s Next?
We currently show all of the content you’ve created in your portfolio, but what if you want to highlight some of your favorite creations and place them front and center? We’d love to add the option for you to customize your main portfolio page to show off what is most important to you.
We’re also talking about ways to show more of your creations on Rec.Net. Rec.Net is a great way to quickly view more information and as we continue to open up more communication and customization options, we’d love to develop more streamlined ways for you to manage audience communication right from your browser.
As far as announcements go, we’d love to create easier ways to view all of your unread announcements at once. Our notifications system is looking a little long in the tooth. We’d love to develop easier ways for you to manage and view your notifications.
Finally, we’re always looking for more ways to allow you to communicate with your audience. We hope that this is just the beginning of a more expressive future for creators everywhere.
As always, if you have comments or suggestions about either of these new features, we’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below and, as always, give it your Rec Room best!