Tee-rific Moderation Update

Once upon a time (summer of 2022), in a faraway land (the roomiverse), and long before Avatar Studio, we launched the Shirt Customizer. It was the first time players could customize clothing and the creativity the community has shown confirmed that when we give you the right tools, you make all kinds of cool stuff and a lot of it - we’ve seen millions and millions of shirts being created and sold. 

So why bring this up now, two years after the feature launched? Well, we’ve got a new feature we’re rolling out for custom shirt publishing and are long overdue for an explainer on how custom shirt moderation has been working behind the scenes. We also want to walk through how we’re applying what we’ve learned from Custom Shirts to our vision for Avatar Studio - so you can create and wear avatar items to be your favorite version of you, while still being fun and welcoming for everyone! 

We’ve seen so much creativity come out in custom shirts, and it really got us thinking about the potential for UGC avatar items. Just look at some of these really fun examples!

We also saw some folks who wanted to push the boundaries and be a little provocative (you know who you are!). A few people really do go too far though, and we saw some customization that just wasn’t appropriate. We’re pretty sure you all know it, but to be clear, if it breaks the Creator Code of Conduct, then we won’t allow it.

We never want the small subset of rule breakers impacting the play or creation experience for the majority of players, so we put some great tools in place that help us detect inappropriate shirts within seconds of publishing. It works by scanning shirts for things that would be a no-go like nudity, hate, or drug content. It took us a while to get these systems fine-tuned, heightening and lowering thresholds for different categories and types of no-go content so that rule breakers had less chance of slipping through the cracks. And that system is now doing a pretty good job of making sure all your excellent creations get published ASAP and those handful of bad ‘uns don’t. 

If your shirt is detected as violating our CCoC, we take down the shirt so it doesn’t make it to the store. We operate on the premise of no harm, no foul - so creators get a warning with no ban because we want you to be able to continue creating great stuff. If our creation tools are repeatedly abused though, we may remove your shirt creation privileges - so consider this fair warning. 

When we were doing that fine tuning and decreased the thresholds for some of the Creator Code of Conduct categories, it got us thinking. What if the AI gets it wrong? How do we match up the automated rules with reality? This can be harder than it sounds as so much of these rules are about context and taste. Technically, if the AI does get it wrong, the risk to the creator is small because we just take down the shirt, but that wasn’t good enough for us. So, we’ve built in a new appeal system for shirts that are flagged by our AI systems. If you think the AI got it wrong and the shirt is not in violation of the CCoC, you can appeal and we will review it and reinstate it if it was a false flag. These appeals will even be used to fine-tune our systems and keep making them more accurate, so please use (but don’t abuse) this new function!

What happens when the AI doesn’t work the other way and something slips through that shouldn’t? Like always, you can report shirts you see that breach the CCoC and we’ll review and take action on those too. 

We’ve learned a lot of lessons enabling everyone to create the shirts they’ve dreamed of, and now those lessons are key to the development of our moderation systems for Avatar Studio. As you’ve seen, we’re taking it slow, building out and fine-tuning our automated scanning and appeal systems to match our CCoC, and planning out extra protections for avatar items that appear in high profile areas like our featured clothing. Keep an eye out for a future update that shares more detail on how we’re integrating trust and safety into the fundamentals of Avatar Studio AND creating tools with the potential for new clothing and accessory styles - Pumpkin Head and Sigma Headband anyone?

A Look Under the Hoodie - A Technical Deep Dive on Full Body Avatars

A Look Under the Hoodie - A Technical Deep Dive on Full Body Avatars

The full body avatar beta is now available for everyone! To celebrate, we wanted to share some of the nerdy details on how we made the full body avatar work and a refresher on why we did it. Jump to the end if you’re curious about what’s next…

Why we decided to make full body avatars

1. More self-expression - One of the main reasons for introducing full body avatars in Rec Room is to create additional opportunities for players to express themselves. The classic bean avatars, while iconic, can sometimes be limited in conveying the widest possible range of emotions and actions. 

2. Easier to understand what’s going on in the game - Our beloved beans are amazing, but sometimes it's a little hard to visually understand what they're doing outside the context of Rec Room. Full human silhouettes with connected limbs make it easier to understand visually what’s going on.

3. Easier for creation - Soon, creators will be able to make their own avatar items to wear and share in Rec Room. Doing the work for the full body avatars allowed us to update the skeleton shared between beans and full body avatars to better match the industry standard so it's easier for our creators to make custom shirts, pants, hats, gloves, shoes, etc.

4. Third-Person is better with full bodies - While controlling and watching your avatar in this improved third-person mode, gameplay and social interactions are just more fun with the full body.

5. Adding new features we’ve wanted in our avatars - Adding new features like noses, adjustable glasses, adjustable body shapes, and eye gleams help breathe new expression into our avatars. These small details contribute to the overall relatability and expressiveness of the avatars, giving our players more options for how they want to look.

6. Adds more ways for all of us to make money - By adding noses, eyebrows, fingers, arms, legs, and feet, we are expanding the kinds of things we and eventually our creators can make and sell to our community.

This was the initial concept art we created as a target for what full body avatars could look like. We’ve made a lot of tweaks and improvements since then, but we feel like the original charm remains.

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Fitting more limbs into the same amount of memory

While we were developing the full body avatar, we recognized that our crash rate due to memory for all of Rec Room, especially on mobile devices, had gotten really bad. Every developer at the company was tasked with making memory optimization their top priority. One of the challenges that made it difficult to ship full body avatars within our original timeline is that we decided we needed to get to a place where the full body avatar, with all of their extra limbs, animation systems, etc., had to use the same (or less) memory as the floating bean. We called this “getting to memory neutral.” 

Here’s where we were when we started the optimization work.

Our benchmark floating bean avatar had 6,095 vertices (which define the geometry), and cost about 4 MB per avatar (which includes all 3 levels of detail meshes). The floating bean also had a total of 18 bones and 4 weights per vertex.

This is the benchmark avatar we used for comparison of our bean geometry cost vs our full body cost

The equivalent full body avatar (which added default pants and shoes) had 11,384 vertices, and cost about 8 MB per avatar before optimization. The full body skeleton currently contains 102 active bones with 4 bone weights per vertex.

We needed to find a way to cut our full body avatar cost in half in order to hit our goal of being “memory neutral.”

We got there with 3 key innovations.

Memory Optimization Innovation #1: Skin Culling Masks

For our first innovation, we built skin culling masks. This technique allows us to throw away some of those expensive vertices in memory by not building parts of the avatar’s skin that are not visible based on what they’re wearing. This means that for every clothing item our artists and creators will author, they can select from a set of existing “skin culling masks” to inform the avatar system which skin faces are hidden when an item is worn. 

Whenever you change what you’re wearing, we look through the set of items you’ve equipped and determine which geometry faces can be completely discarded. This comes with the added benefit of avoiding clipping bugs by just removing the problematic underlying skin! 

You’ve probably noticed during our beta that when authoring our huge catalog of avatar items, some culling masks weren’t set correctly, or needed to be adjusted.  While we fixed many neck and wrist gaps, missing fingers and hands there’s still work to do. We are continuing to clean this up during our polish work.

You can see here in the right image that there are fewer skin polygons under the clothes compared to the left image that doesn’t have skin culling turned on. The Skin Culling technique allowed us to throw away between 1k to 2k vertices on average.

Memory Optimization Innovation #2: MeshData, and Vertex Data Compression

For our second innovation, we re-wrote how the avatar mesh was built using a new primitive called the MeshData feature. This dramatically sped up how our avatars are built, and removed an annoying frame hitch that sometimes happened. 

Before, you’d probably notice when a player joins a room there can be a few frames of lag, especially on lower-powered devices like the Quest 2. That’s no longer the case with full body avatars. 

Another nice thing about the MeshData feature is that it allowed us to compress the data per vertex so we could manipulate how much memory that bone weights and UVs took up. With this optimization, we saved about 30% of our total memory.

This is a snapshot from deep within our code of how we changed the layout of our vertex data to trade precision for memory efficiency (using half and byte data types instead of floats and integers saved us 60% of our unvarying data)

Memory Optimization Innovation #3: Just-in-Time Level of Detail

For our third and final innovation, we developed a technique we call just-in-time level of detail. The classic floating bean system builds all three level of detail meshes whenever a new avatar appears and holds on to them in memory. We then only show one of these meshes at a time based on how far that player is from your camera.

Showing the different level of details that an avatar may have

Because of the work we did to use the MeshData type above, we could explore building a dynamic avatar that builds the avatar when the level of detail should change without experiencing those frame lags. So now we only pay the memory for what we display. This saved us another 40% of memory on average. 

This trades off some compute time for memory savings, but we found across all of our platforms that thanks to Unity’s MeshData and multithreaded Jobs, it does not impact FPS!

So in total, we were able to reduce the cost of the full body avatar by around 60~70%, more than the 50% we needed. This is why we say that the full body avatar is more optimized than the floating bean.

Memory problem solved! What about the frame rate?

Thanks to Unity’s animation system, we found that all of our platforms could pretty smoothly handle the complexity of the extra limbs. Where we did add some considerable computational expense is in the full body inverse kinematic (IK) solver we use. 

Full body IK helps with the believable movements of the body, arms, and legs on screens and in VR while only tracking or animating your head and hands. With enough players in a room, lower-end platforms started to show bad FPS. So instead of updating the full body IK solver for every player on every frame, we built a system to dynamically update player animations up to a certain amount per frame, prioritizing those avatars closest to the player or those that haven't been updated in a few frames. 

This priority-sorted technique ensures that you always get a good FPS, but at the cost of some players’ movement stuttering a bit, especially when they are far away from your camera. This felt like the right trade-off for us.

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Interaction Improvements: Showing your hands while grabbing stuff

One of the big challenges for full body avatars was coming up with a way to show you grabbing objects. With the floating bean, we got away with this by hiding your hand whenever you were holding something. But since one of our major goals was to make it easier for others to understand what you were doing, we knew we needed to find a good solution for making sure holding items looked good.

We tried a bunch of different approaches, including snapping your virtual hand to a spot on the grabbed item. But that felt like the game was physically pulling you around and rotating your hand. We decided that we should always honor where your hand is in real space and have the grabbed objects come to them, so your virtual hand feels as close as possible to your real one. You can especially feel how this improves the stabilizing handles for laser weapons while in VR. 

We did find one exception to the rule that felt nice. Instead of allowing your avatar arms to stretch as long as they need to match the location of your real hand, there’s a point where if you move a held item too far, your hand will look like it let go and the tool hovers where you’re holding it in real space…kind of like you’re still controlling it with magical powers. We call it the “Telekinesis effect.” 

The telekinesis effect

Then there’s the visual gripping effect for (many) objects. We wanted the visual to look cohesive for Rec Room objects. In order to give our artists control over how hands are posed when grabbing the object, we created an internal tool called the Hand Grip Placer. Our Artists can then determine how objects should sit in the hand and what hand pose they should take. During the beta period of full body avatars, we are continuing to work through all of the 500+ items you can grab in Rec Room to make sure that you have great-looking grips.

This is an internal tool we wrote to give our Grip Artists a way to place and pose how the hand should grab each one of our 500+ items in the game.

Improved movement & animation

Thanks to the work of @joedanimation , we have enhanced and added more life to our avatar animations. This includes improvements in walking, running, jumping, climbing, clambering, wall running, and sliding. Our goal is that Rec Room feels immersive and expressive, and these improved animations do a lot to ground the avatars in the reality of the game space. 

We are still working on polishing all of the animations in the game as part of our beta work.

Bean slide compared to full body slide

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Full body avatars is still in beta, so what are we working on to get it out of beta?

We are continuously iterating on the full body avatar, and now that every player can use them, we are interested in hearing and working on feedback from everyone. 

We are continuing to work on how the full body avatar moves in VR and screens (especially with dancing and idle animations), fixing holotars to work with full body, making it so a creator can determine which avatar types are used in their costumes, fixing the ability to adjust how hats sit on your head, fixing more screen-based animations (have you noticed how full body avatars drink water bottles through their eye? :P), finishing up all of the grip poses for the 500+ items, and exposing the underlying sliders that shape your body and head so you can have more control in customizing your form.

We are also continuing to polish some of our legacy avatar items that don’t look great yet on the full body avatars (we know some gloves aren’t where we’d like them yet). Finally, we haven’t forgotten about full body tracking and finger tracking for our VR players.

Only when this list of things are done (and we address additional feedback we receive) will we consider dropping the beta status. 

Our commitment to the floating bean avatars

We know a lot of you are concerned that we may deprecate the floating bean avatar when we determine full body avatars are ready to be out of beta. Don’t worry! We are committed to supporting and upgrading floating beans that have been here since the beginning of Rec Room. 

One of our big tasks right now is to take the optimizations that you read about above— such as skin culling masks and just-in-time level of detail— and bring them to the bean so we can reduce their cost by 60%. This will be a big help in our fight to improve performance on all platforms. 

Additionally, we plan to bring over some new features to the bean like being able to see your customized hands when grabbing objects, being able to see your torso when you look down, and the option to have a nose, the option to have eyebrows, and the option for eye gleam. Whether you want to preserve your classic bean as is, selectively add some of the improvements (such as eye gleam, or eyebrows), or move all the way to a full body avatar - we will fully support you.

Look out for an upcoming dev blog where we will dive deeper into our plans for preserving and enhancing the floating bean avatars.

With the upgraded bean (coming soon™) , your glove customization can stay visible when holding items like the laser pistol. We’ll also have an option to hide your hand if that’s the interaction you prefer.

Fractura - A Research Project: Exploring Generative AI in Rec Room Creation

Introduction

Fractura is a room where we explored extensive use of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in the Rec Room creation workflow.

The result was the creation of an immersive alien world brimming with ancient mysteries!

Rec Room’s in-house Creative Team took a broad and experimental approach, evaluating over 20 different GenAI tools to identify which had the most potential to benefit Rec Room’s creative community. Since Rec Room Studio is built on top of Unity 3D, all of the GenAI tools mentioned in this doc and others can be used by any Rec Room creator today.

Concept Phase

The use of GenAI started in the concept phase - the team used ChatGPT to develop the ideas behind Fractura, iterating through many prompts. The team explored ideas for landscapes, flora, and lore to flesh out the concept.

These ideas were then visualized using Midjourney and Dall-E. Fed by the text output of ChatGPT, these AI image generators created striking visual concepts.

This process was iterative, with the team using each round as inspiration to refine the ideas and shape Fractura’s identity and aesthetic.

If you want to see “behind the scenes”, here are detailed logs of what the concepting phase looked like:

ChatGPT Prompt Log

Midjourney and Dal-E Generated Concepts

Skyboxes

In video games, a “skybox” is an immersive texture that makes the environment seem larger than it really is. Creating convincing skyboxes is a difficult task that requires artists to create tricky “spherical” textures.

For Fractura, the team used Skybox AI by Blockade Labs. Skybox AI allowed the team to quickly generate skyboxes with the right kind of ethereal ambiance by entering text prompts based on the output of the concept phase.

The ease of generation allowed the team to create multiple skyboxes that players can choose from dynamically in the world of Fractura.

3D Asset Generation

GenAI was also used to generate 3D assets. Tools like CSM, Shap-E, and others had pros and cons. These tools were used to create trees, ancient stone robots, floating land masses, and distant buildings, instilling Fractura with an otherworldly allure.

However, optimization and performance challenges were commonplace. The assets generated often had very high polygon counts, requiring manual simplification and optimization so they could be used successfully in Rec Room Studio. Generation times were also often quite lengthy.

Despite some challenges, the future for 3D GenAI looks bright, and the team looks forward to further explorations!

Texture Creation and Soundscape

The team used Withpoly.com for texture creation and MusicGen for the soundscape.

Withpoly.com facilitated the rapid generation of textures and normal maps, allowing the team to integrate detailed textures into the game's environment and architectural elements. Since it was quick and easy to iterate on textures and normal maps, the team found they could use this tool to get just the kind of “otherworldly allure” they were going for.

When it came to the soundscape, MusicGen really delivered. This AI-powered music generator helped create a soundscape tailored to Fractura's alien landscape. The tool's ability to synthesize otherworldly tones, evocative melodies, and ambient soundscapes helped instill Fractura with captivating and immersive audio.

Want to listen to Fractura’s soundscape? Fractura’s Soundscape

Ideation and Interactive Elements

ChatGPT, Midjourney, and CSM helped the team create interactive experiences within the alien landscape. The incorporation of AI-generated components led to the development activities, such as a target shooting game and an interactive fire spirit. 

While these interactive elements weren’t generated “whole cloth” by GenAI tools, the GenAI applications made the creative process more efficient and enabled a smooth flow from conceptualizing ideas to implementing tangible in-game elements.

Envisioning the Future of GenAI

The final exploration zone, named the Holodeck, symbolizes the future potential of GenAI! Using the GenAI tools from Blockade Labs, the team created an experience where players can choose from a variety of generated 3D environments - a glimpse of the future where immersive 3D environments can be generated on the fly in response to player input.

Conclusion

Fractura is a milestone in Rec Room’s exploration of GenAI, highlighting both its transformative potential and the challenges in integrating it. Fractura exemplifies how Rec Room creators can leverage GenAI and Rec Room Studio to iterate and craft engaging rooms efficiently based on their imagination, creativity, and vision.

Custom Melee Weapons

When concepting Make it to Midnight, one of our main focuses was asking “What can’t creators easily do?”, and using that to guide our thinking for new mechanics in an RRO. We’ve already talked about how this led to Data Tables and Room Progression, but another concept we wanted to facilitate creation for was custom melee weapons - and that means something creators have been asking for for a long time now - Go-karts! Uhh, no wait, a Swing Handle! This means no more clamping shapes to swords just to get a good cross-platform experience! 

You’ve probably already seen the Swing handle through Bonky’s hammer in Make it to Midnight. And to  make this hammer feel the best it can, we had to make a few other components too so that creators can make RRO-quality custom melee weapons. 

Specifically, the new CV2 features that went in to making custom melee weapons a reality were:

• Swing Handle

• Collision Detection Volume

• Motion Trail

• New velocity chips

• Handle haptics

Emulating an RRO Weapon

One of our core goals with custom melee weapons was that creators would be able to easily hook up our components to create something that feels as good as, if not better than, our existing RRO melee weapons. To help with this, we broke down everything existing RRO weapons could do (the list was surprisingly long), and capture that behavior in a completely customizable way. This resulted in three core components - the Swing Handle, the Collision Detection Volume, and the Motion Trail. 

With these components, you can set up your own custom melee weapon as simply as this: 

This default setup will behave just like an RRO melee weapon and will have a good default impulse for hitting players and objects. If you want to try it out for yourself, just copy the above screenshot and have fun!

If you want to know more about the individual components, the Motion Trail component has been out for a while already, so let’s dive into the new Swing Handle and Collision Detection Volume.

Swing Handle

The Swing Handle, like our RRO swords, detects swings by clicking for screens players and by physical motion for VR players. The swing for screens players supports all of the animations from our existing RRO weapons, as well as a new animation, “Pickaxe,” that we hope players will find useful.

Charged attacks for screens players work on Swing Handles, however unlike RRO weapons they no longer move the player forward. If you want to add something like that functionality back, once we ship custom locomotion you’ll be able to apply velocity to the player when they start a swing.

Swing Handle - Aim Assist

One new exclusive feature of the Swing Handle is Aim Assist for Gamepad and Touch players, which is enabled by default. In order for creators to be able to use the Swing Handle to build high quality PvP games with melee weapons, we wanted to make sure that players on all platforms were able to easily chase and target other players when holding the Swing Handle.

This was an issue we ran into while initially implementing Bonky’s hammer in Make it to Midnight. Before we decided to add aim assist, it was very hard to hit other players on mobile. To remedy that, we reused and retuned our existing Aim Assist for RRO ranged weapons to support melee aim assist for the Swing Handle too. Before the Swing Handle leaves beta, creators will be able to customize who these features target.

Collision Detection Volume

Another important consideration for melee weapons was that melee hits should feel fun and realistic, both against players and objects. The first step of that was detecting collisions accurately, and what we had at the time, Trigger Volume, wasn’t very good for this purpose.

Trigger Volumes aren’t as reliable when they’re moving, and they don’t provide as much useful data on what they hit. This led us to creating the Collision Detection Volume, a new component that uses a series of spherecasts to detect collisions and provide meaningful data. This is why when you spawn the component in-game, you’ll see a capsule with several spheres inside of it - the spheres are what actually detect collisions.

Placing a Collision Detection Volume Component

When you first place down the Collision Detection Volume component, it might feel a bit weird. We recommend turning on the Show Selection Bounds makerpen setting when placing a Collision Detection Volume component if you have it turned off, as it will help you understand how the placement works.

We have lots of props that scale uniformly, like our existing melee weapons, and we have other components that are deformable, meaning they can scale along a singular direction, like the trigger volume for example. Because it has to be a uniform capsule, the Collision Detection Volume component is the first of its kind that is semi-deformable. As a capsule, scaling along the X or Z axis will scale both axes uniformly because it’s scaling the radius. The height can be scaled separately from the radius.

Due to performance reasons and maintaining a stable ink cost for the component, we limited the amount of inner spheres to 8 (at least for now). Because of this, the ratio of the height of the capsule to its diameter can currently be a maximum of 8:1.

Collision Detection Volume - Hit Events

At its core, the Collision Detection Volume component is composed of four events that output a Collision Data and the velocity of the specific sphere in the collider that hit:

• On Player Hit - fires when hitting any player.

• There is also a corresponding event for this in the Player Definition Board

• If it is part of a hierarchy (e.g. clamped to a Swing Handle), it will not detect hits with the player holding the hierarchy (or seated in it, in the case of a seat or vehicle)

• On Object Hit - fires when hitting any object. 

• If the held object’s hierarchy is held by a player, the output Collision Data will contain both the object hit and the holding player. 

• If it is part of a hierarchy (e.g. clamped to a Swing Handle), it will not detect hits with other objects in the same hierarchy

• On Other Hit - fires when hitting any non-makerpen-selectable object, like the white scene geometry in a Rec Room Studio room or the ground in a copy of ^Park.

• On Any Hit - fires when any of the above three fire, with the exact same data

These all internally manage their own cooldowns. For example, you won’t get a Player Hit event every single frame that the player is inside the collision detection volume, meaning you can easily rely on this to hook up a damage system.

For performance reasons, a Collision Detection Volume component will not detect hits when it isn’t moving unless you specifically toggle a setting in its configuration to allow for this.

Collision Detection Volume - The Object Board

Since we want this to be a core building block for custom melee weapons (though we expect players will find plenty of other uses for it as well), we wanted to make sure hitting something feels significant, and that meant implementing a fun and fully customizable default audio and impulse (applying velocity) on hits. Through much iteration, we now have the current largest default object board of all of our CV2 components.

The default impulse for hit objects is based on the speed of the collision. When we tested hitting props in VR, this is what felt the most natural as it supports variation in impulse between hitting an object slowly or quickly. You’ll notice a new chip in the object impulse section - Request Velocity Set Over Duration.

In our own testing while iterating on these default impulses, one of the issues we noticed was that the physical geometry of a custom sword would interfere with the impulse from the Collision Detection Volume, and half the time a collision just wouldn’t feel right in VR. Our RRO swords, as well as rally buggies, reapply their collision impulses over the course of a few frames, and we wanted to mimic that here. This new chip lets us continuously set the velocity for a fraction of a second after the hit, to make sure that the sword’s physical geometry doesn’t get in the way.

You’ll notice some other new chips in the section of the object board for hitting a player too:

• Vector3 Inverse

• Vector3 Project on Plane

• Player Get Is Grounded

• Velocity Add (New)

The first three chips were important for us to get a good default direction for hitting players. Objects get hit in the direction of the hit itself, but players get hit away from the holding player (if the Collision Detection Volume is part of a held tool). We also wanted to make sure that players didn’t just get impulsed into the ground, especially if they’re on a slope, so we make sure that the hit always goes just a tiny bit “up” in addition to “forward”.

One thing we noticed in early versions of Make it to Midnight is that hitting a player didn’t feel good when it took a few seconds to see them get pushed away. To account for this, we added a new chip Velocity Add (New). This chip simulates the velocity change immediately when it is applied to remote players, and will eventually replace the current Velocity Add chip. This is what allows hammer hits to feel so responsive in Make it to Midnight, and we actually use the same system for our rally buggies on this one as well!

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We look forward to seeing what you create with these new features! If you have any questions about how to use them or want to show off what you’ve done with them, feel free to post in our Discord!

To see dev blogs for other features that we added while working on Make it to Midnight, check out our posts on Data Tables and Room Progression. There’s also one major feature Make it to Midnight uses that we’re still working on before it’s ready for creators–Custom Locomotion! Look forward to seeing that in the new year!

Room Progression

Level up your rooms by leveling up your players! The progression system used in Make it to Midnight is now live in Beta.

The CV2 State Machine

Creators are making incredibly impressive rooms these days. Many of these rooms involve managing lots of data and intricate circuitry, performing remarkably complex tasks. Recently, we talked about how Data Tables can help on the data side. 

Now we’re introducing The State Machine to help on the circuits side - it manages all that awesome complex circuitry easily by breaking things down into simpler states.

Fast Facts

• Simplified Complex Functionality: State Machine chips simplify the management of intricate circuitry in Rooms by breaking it down into simpler states.

• One State at a Time: These chips ensure that only one child state is active at a time, reducing the risk of conflicts between different behaviors and eliminating the need for complicated condition checks across different states.

• Modular Design: Easily add, modify, or remove states within the State Machine, just like you would with a circuit board.

• Nested State Machines: State Machines can also be nested within State chips, allowing for more intricate control over sub-states.

• Synced or Unsynced: State Machines can be configured as synced or unsynced. Synced states provide consistency across players in multi-player environments.

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THE STATE MACHINE CHIPS

You can now add a CV2 State Machine chip to your rooms from the palette to get started. Think of the State Machine chip as a circuit board with a superpower: only one child state is active at a time. That means the events inside a State Machine execute when a state chip is active (and do not execute when that chip is inactive). 

What would a State Machine be without its states? Enter the State chip. If you’re familiar with circuit boards you know that you can edit into them to add more chips. The same is true for the State Machine chip. 

The State chip partners with the State Machine chip. By default, a State Machine chip contains a child State chip. Remember, only one child state is active at any given moment.

Let’s go deeper into the chip hierarchy by editing into that State chip to see what makes it tick. State chips come with child chips that allow you to go to other states and control what happens when entering or exiting this state.

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NPC STATE MACHINE EXAMPLE

Now that you have a rundown of what the State Machine chips are, let’s see them in action!

In games, Non-Playable Characters (or NPCs for short) often use state machines to handle the complex functionality needed to bring these characters to life. Using State chips, we can easily transition to a specific NPC state, regardless of whatever state it happened to be in before.

Let’s create a simple NPC state machine example to see how the pieces come together. Say we want an enemy NPC with three behaviors: patrol, take cover, and attack. 

• Drop a State Machine chip into the room from the palette and use the configuration menu to name it “NPC State Machine”.

• Open up the palette and add in two event definition chips that control the NPC’s behavior: “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player”.

Edit into the State Machine chip. 

• Since State Machine chips come with a child State chip by default, let’s rename this default chip to “Patrol State”. 

• We will also add two more state chips from the palette and rename them “Take Cover State” and “Attack State”.

We want the NPC to patrol by default, so the “Patrol State” state needs to be active. Since we renamed the default State chip that came with the State Machine, we’re all set.

If we ever want to change the default active state, we can do that by configuring the NPC State Machine chip and changing the default state value.

Let’s imagine that our NPC takes out high-tech range-finding binoculars when they start patrolling and puts them away when they stop patrolling. Plus we only want them using binoculars when patrolling. Keep this in mind, we’ll use the binoculars to show how a state machine can help simplify complex functionality later.

• Edit into the “Patrol State” chip to set up what happens when the NPC enters and exits this state. 

• Use the State Did Enter event receiver that’s already in the State chip to execute the circuits needed when “Patrol State" becomes active. In this case, we’ll connect it to a circuit board that tells the NPC to take out its binoculars and start patrolling. 

Similarly, use the State Will Exit event receiver that’s already in the State chip to put the NPC’s binoculars away and stop patrolling whenever this state becomes inactive.

Now let’s tell the NPC what happens when it gets shot at (take cover) or if it sees a player (attack). We make these transitions happen with our State Constant and Go To State chips.

• Add two event receivers and configure them to use the event definitions we created earlier: “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player”.

• We want to create transitions to two other states: “Take Cover State” and “Attack State”. Our State chip comes with one State Constant so we only need to add one more. Configure one of them to “Take Cover State” and the other to “Attack State”.

• Connect one of the State Constants to the Go To State chip that’s already here in our State chip. Add one more Go To State chip from the palette and connect it to the other State Constant. 

• Finally connect our “NPC Got Shot At” and “NPC Sees The Player” event receivers to the Go To State chips. Now when the NPC gets shot at, it will go to the take cover state. When the NPC sees the player it will transition to the attack state.

There you have it! We’ve created an NPC that has three separate states that will never conflict with each other because only one child state is active at a time! 

Thanks to this, we don’t need to worry about whether another NPC Got Shot At event receiver inside a different State chip does something that conflicts with our patrol behavior. Event receivers inside inactive State chips don’t execute. No need for complicated condition checks across all of our different states!

Going back to those awesome high tech range-finding binoculars from our example: Our NPC only uses them when they patrol. We made sure that the NPC puts them away when they leave the “Patrol State” by using the State Will Exit event receiver. No matter what state the NPC goes to next, those fancy binoculars are tucked safely away.

---

STATE MACHINES INSIDE STATE CHIPS

You can also nest state machines within state chips! Imagine we want states inside our Patrol State chip that decide if the NPC is walking or jogging when they are patrolling. Thanks to the state machine’s superpower, we can! 

When the Patrol State chip is active, its child chips are active too, including child State Machine chips and their children. It works all the way down the chip hierarchy.

Let’s get into how to do this.

• Add a new State Machine chip inside the Patrol State chip and name it “Patrol Behavior State Machine”. 

• Add an event called “NPC Jog” that we can use inside our new State Machine chip. 

Add a mechanism by which an NPC switches between jog and walk. Use a Random Int chip, an If chip, and an Equals chip to send the NPC Jog event randomly to the State chips inside our new State Machine chip. This will randomly tell the NPC to walk or jog!

Edit into our Patrol Behavior State Machine chip and rename the default State chip that’s already there to “Walk State”. This state is active by default, so our NPC walks while it patrols.

• To make it possible to jog, add a new State chip and name it “Jog State”.

Within the Walk State chip, use the State did Enter and State Will Exit chip to make the NPC start walking when entering this state and stop walking before leaving this state. 

• Add and configure an event receiver for the “NPC Jog” event. Conjure a State constant and connect it to a Go To State chip to transition from the walk state to the jog state. If the Random Int chip we set up earlier outputs a zero instead of a one, the “NPC Jog” event executes and we transition to the Jog state.

Now when our NPC is in the patrol state they either walk or jog while patrolling. Importantly, our other states still don’t need to worry at all about what happens when the NPC patrols. When the NPC is taking cover we don’t want them walking around! When the NPC is attacking we don’t want them to use their high-tech binoculars!

Since our states use the State Will Exit event to clean up the current state before leaving, we’ve made it easier to manage and create new functionality for our enemy NPC.

---

SYNCED STATE MACHINES

One last thing before you dive into creating your own state machines to make your functionality simpler to think about, manage, and expand on: state machines can be synced or unsynced. A synced state machine’s active state makes the experience consistent across all players in your room. Just use the configure tool on your State Machine chip and look for the Synced toggle. 

Data Tables and Rewards

Managing lots of data in Circuits, especially stuff like sequential strings for dialogue or the details of a progression system, has always been pretty tricky. It requires a ton of variables and complex graphs to select which to use in a given circumstance.

It’s more typical for game designers to use a specialized tool for things like this - like a good ol’ spreadsheet! Given the excitement around Make it to Midnight’s progression and this need, we’re introducing Data Tables, a tool to help make this easier.

Pictured: In-development version of data tables. The UI may be slightly different upon full release. 

How do DATA TABLES work?

To start with Data Tables, spawn a Data Table definition chip with the maker pen and configure it to get to the edit screen. From there, you can add columns and rows. Each column is assigned a Type - int, float, bool, string, color, or Reward (more on these later!)

Input your data, adding or copying or moving columns and rows as needed, and then save. 

⚠️Important: You must use the “Save” button in the data table editing UI, which will then save the room. Saving the room via any other method - including another player saving it while you’re editing - may result in lost work. 

Once there’s data in your table, you can use more chips to pull it out of the table and into the rest of your code.

Configure the DataTable Get Cell chip to point at a specific Data Table and column. (You’ve gotta specify the column in advance because we’ve gotta know the Type of the output pin!) Then, you can extract data from that column on a per-row basis.

The idea is that each row is a set of similar data, and you’re doing the same operation on different sets depending on the circumstances. Let’s say you’ve got a table named Enemies that contains details about various enemy encounters:

You can notify players about each kill and hand out gold with a relatively small graph. Here’s a simplified version here:

You can also search for information within the Data Table. Using DataTable Get Rows Containing or DataTable Get First Row Containing you can reference row information based on the name string “Goblin” (sorry, exact matches only). Or you can pull a random Challenge 6 enemy to throw at your players without having to hard-code what row in the table they’re on.

Rewards

Rewards are a way to pack keys, currency quantities, and consumable bundles into a data table with a consistent and slightly fancier presentation. Rewards are used heavily in the upcoming Progression system (more info about that soon!), and you may have noticed that the gif at the top of this post is from Make it to Midnight, where we’re using Rewards for the Perks. 

You make Rewards a lot like you make Keys and Consumables. Check your Room Settings for a new tab!

Once your room has some Rewards ready to go, you can put them in a data table and/or directly grant them to players with the Reward Constant and the Grant Reward chip. (For those curious, Make it to Midnight’s Perks uses Rewards to grant Keys, and then those Keys enable Circuits behaviors by using Player Owns Room Key as a filter.)

There’s also a new Show Reward Notification chip that you can use to notify players of between 1-3 Rewards at once.

For advanced users

Don’t want to type in all your data manually?

There’s an Import button on the Data Table edit screen. It’s expecting CSV, which you can usually export from other spreadsheets:

Here’s an example of the formatting it’s looking for:

schema:

Score,int

Speed,float

Title,string

CanUseTurret,bool

Rank,Color

data:

10,1.5,Scaredy Cat,False,8080FF

200,2.75,Brave Warrior,True,FF80FF

500,3.25,Expert Player,True,FF8000

Note: This doesn’t work for Rewards. You’re better off leaving those blank and hooking them up in the game.

What’s next?

A Progression system that builds on Data Tables and Rewards - as seen in Make it to Midnight - is coming Soon™.   Watch this space for a tour when it ships!

Rec Room Studio and Generative AI

Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock, you’ve probably experienced the hype around generative AI. We wanted to share our thoughts on how we think these powerful new tools will impact Rec Room, especially Rec Room Studio.

While it’s early days, we think the hype is warranted! Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and others are becoming more powerful at an impressive clip. Every day announces intriguing new possibilities for streamlining, enhancing and even completely revolutionizing the art and science of game development.

We are excited for Rec Room creators to integrate AI tools into their workflow. And the obvious starting point for doing that is Rec Room Studio (RRS). Just as RRS allows creators to import and utilize content from Blender, Maya, Photoshop, and a whole constellation of other tools, it’s also a great vehicle for AI-generated content.

Here are some of the experiments we’ve seen so far…

Creator Emma Bitt used generative tools to generate parts of her amazing room “Mountain Spirits”. You can visit it right now!

https://rec.net/d/room/MountainSpirits

RRS design lead @zizzyphus has been using Midjourney to create textures for her WIP “Quilted World” room:

And @gribbly has been experimenting with integrating ChatGPT directly into Rec Room Studio (inspired by AICommand by Keijiro Takahashi of Unity Japan). In the following images, the red spiraling shapes were generated via a ChatGPT prompt entered directly in the Rec Room Studio UI, then published to all of Rec Room’s supported platforms instantly:

These examples barely scratch the surface of what will be possible by combining generative AI with Rec Room Studio. But we think they point at an incredibly powerful workflow for our creators.

We invite you to help us discover what’s possible - we can’t wait to see what you build/generate!

Hierarchical Building

This is a quick overview of our Hierarchical Building alpha preview! I’ll cover how to find it, how to use it, and what’s not working yet. 
If you’d like to walk through it step by step, here is a survey-style tutorial for the basics! (You don’t have to submit, but we’d love your feedback if you’re so inclined!)

What is hierarchical building?

A hierarchical object is an object made up of other objects, just like things in the real world. If you took apart an oscillating desk fan you’d have a collection of other objects - blades, buttons, and motors. Attaching them to each other in the right order is what lets the blades of the fan spin while its head oscillates, but at the end it’s still a single object that you can interact with without thinking about its many parts. 
An object here is defined as any amount of stuff in a container. Think of these containers like our old shape containers, except they can hold more than just shapes - chips, props, components, and even other containers. This is the basis of a hierarchy: containers with other containers inside them.

How do I get started?

Create a new Maker Room. In the room settings, enable the Creative Beta. Once the automatic save is completed, you’ll have a new toggle for the Hierarchical Building Alpha Preview. Enable that, it’ll save again, and then you’re there.

NOTE:  It is STRONGLY recommended that you don’t flip this switch on a room that you care about without making a backup copy first. Not everything works in a hierarchical room yet, and while you should be able to roll back using room restore, this is a one way conversion, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. 

How to make a hierarchy

If you create a new shape at room scope, we’ll add a container above it for you. You’ll be moved inside the scope of your new container so you can just continue drawing - like shape containers today.

Only containers can have children!

Otherwise, there are two primary ways to make an object:

• The Quick Action Menu available on the Select tool has a “Create Object” option (renamed from Merge.) Create Object will place your selection into a new container.

• The Connect Tool - connecting one object to another will attempt to make the first object a child of the second. The order matters!

  • If the parent object is a container, the first object will become a child of the container.

  • If the parent is a shape, it will be put into a new container, and then the first object will become a child of that container.

“Scope” is the word we use to define where you’re at in a hierarchy. Your edit scope determines what you can edit, and in some cases, what you can see. “Room scope” is the outermost scope. If you’re inside a container, you’re in that container’s scope, and anything that isn’t “in scope” for editing will be faded out or hidden.

You can use these tools at any scope. Using “Create Object” on a selection of children will create another container, and those shapes will end up one scope lower than they were before.

Navigating a hierarchy

The “Edit” button is how you navigate up and down a hierarchy. If you’re inside a container you’ll see both “Edit” and “Edit Out” at the top of your maker pen menu. Edit Out will take you up a scope, and the Edit tool will take you into the scope of whatever your highlighted target is. 

You can name your containers in the config menu, and you’ll see a preview of their name whenever you edit into them.

You’ll also find these options in the Quick Action Menu when you’re using the Select tool. Edit Out will always be available if you’re inside an object, while Edit In will only be available if your selection is a container. 

The Quick Action Menu also contains other useful options:

• Split to Parent moves the selected object up one scope

• Split to Room moves a selected object up to the room scope

• Create Object is always present to let you add another layer to the hierarchy

• Center Pivot will center the object point on your current selection.

New Looks

When you start pointing at objects, you’ll notice some new highlight colors. If you point at a shape, chip or prop within your current scope, it will highlight in green as it always has. But if what you’re hovering over is a complex object - a container with stuff in it - it’ll be blue instead, and you’ll see a small holographic box that represents its pivot point.

When you edit into an object, that holographic pivot point preview turns into a small UI widget, similar to our transform handles, that shows local axis colors and can be selected, moved, and rotated. We call this the “object point.” By moving the object point, you’re also moving the pivot point of the object, and when you edit back out again, you’ll see that the holographic pivot preview has moved to reflect any changes you made. 

Gizmos

There are a few things that have changed conceptually, but the visuals haven’t caught up yet! The one I want to mention here is gizmos. 

In a hierarchy, gizmos are containers that can move their children. Therefore, connecting something to a gizmo is done the same way as with any other container. 

What this means is that it no longer matters whether you target the gizmo’s body or the metal axis. All that matters is the order in which you’re doing it. Connecting an object to a rotator will make that object the child of the rotator. Connecting a rotator to an object will make the rotator a child of the object instead. 

Hierarchical Circuits

The circuit layer exists in every scope. As you navigate up and down an object’s hierarchy, you’re simultaneously navigating that object’s circuit hierarchy, too. Any container with chips has an object board that displays the same name as the container. Editing the visible object or its board will take you into the object’s scope.

The object point acts as the anchor for the object board and the scope origin for stuff like “Set Position,” too!

As you navigate a hierarchy, chips appear or not based on whether or not they’re in your current scope. While objects above your scope are grayed out, all chips outside of your scope are hidden completely (though there’s a setting to change this if you’d like to.) 

Tip: Detach your object boards for the best editing experience. We’ll probably make this automatic but we haven’t yet. :]

Tip: Moving things to a new scope in your hierarchy can break existing circuit wires. We recommend that you get your hierarchy as you want it before you do a bunch of wiring!

Known Issues

Props will not function as parents! Not all props - especially interactive props - will function in a hierarchy as children. 

• What for sure DOES work as child objects: Buttons, toggle buttons, and most components without a player input mechanism (e.g. lights, audio players)

• What for sure DOESN’T work: Invisible collision, Gun and Trigger handles, all CV1 objects, most interactive props.

• Avoid for now: Costume dummies, seats

• Edit tool does not work on Object Boards. Target Containers and Gizmos directly to edit into them. You can't currently access a prop's board at all.

Not yet implemented:

• Collision, grabbability, and physics settings

• Tube control point editing

• Undo/Redo

• Clone

• Copy/Paste
  

If you get stuck

• If you try to delete something that doesn’t work, you’ve probably run across something that isn’t supported yet. The best thing to do is leave without saving (and we’re sorry about any lost work - we’re chasing these down one by one!) 

• Rolling back to an old save should work, even if that old save is before you flipped the Hierarchical Building switch.
  

Got feedback?

We’d love to hear it!  Please join us in Discord or leave us a note on our new Hierarchical Building Zendesk. Keep an eye out for a survey from Coach - in a few weeks, we’ll send one to everyone who’s participated. 

Custom Shirts Marketplace

Custom Shirts Marketplace: The First Step of a Grand Plan

The Economy Team at Rec Room just rolled out the marketplace features of one of our most ambitious projects - Custom Shirts!

Our team’s goal is to make Rec Room a place where our creators can be rewarded (and paid!) for the amazing things they make. Our grand ambition is to build a marketplace where our players make everything they can buy and wear. We believe there is a HUGE market opportunity if we get it right.

Since June of this year, RR+ members have been using the Clothing Customizer tool (found in their backpack) to create their own graphic tees to wear on their Rec Room avatars. Whatever markers, paintbrushes, or gizmos they can use to draw on a whiteboard or art canvas, they can now use to draw their own designs on the front and back of a t-shirt.

When we launched this feature, we were excited (and honestly a little nervous) to see what our players would create. We’ve really enjoyed seeing all of the different designs everyone has been making and wearing.

Like this cute custom shirt from Gen #9930 on Discord!

As we thought about this marketplace, we realized there are some hard problems to figure out. Here are the 4 biggest questions that we faced:

1. The Avatar Ink Question: How do we reduce ink costs for items players wear, to open up more possibilities for creators? Ink is how we measure the cost to render items, gizmos, costumes, etc in Rec Room. It’s important that the game looks good and runs smoothly across all rooms and on all of our devices, including all of our supported Android and iOS phones.

2. The Authoring Question: How do we make it easy enough for creators to author the things players wear? And make sure that we don’t lose the charm of what makes Rec Room look like Rec Room.

3. The Moderation Question: If we let our players make the things our players can wear ANYWHERE, how big of a bee hive are we unleashing on our moderators? There’s a big difference between managing rooms that players choose to go to, and moderating what people can wear in the Rec Center .

4. The Economy Question: How do we find the balance between enough of a free marketplace so our creators can experiment and enough regulation to avoid exploitation or a race to the bottom? It’s taken us a lot of experimentation to figure out how to best position and price what we sell in the Store (and we’re still figuring it out for ourselves). 

But here’s the thing about how we go after hard problems at Rec Room: instead of spending many months trying to design (and guess) what might be the solution, we build something we can ship fast, so we can learn from our players what the solution should be.

This is why coming out with Custom Shirts felt like the perfect way to test our hypotheses for our grander ambition.

Let’s break it down question by question on why Custom Shirts felt like the right next step.

What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Avatar Ink Question

Costumes were the first step towards building a way for our players to create what they wear

We’ve been testing creator made outfits ever since we released the Costume prop in rooms. It allowed us to get feedback from creators on what works (attaching shapes to the body parts of a mannequin works better than expected!) and what doesn’t work (costumes are way too expensive and hard to use for a lot of our players).

In order to make costumes wearable everywhere, we have a lot of work to do to manage their ink cost. So we asked ourselves, do we really need to go after this big technical problem to learn all the things we want to learn?

We love drawing on shirts in games like Animal Crossing: New Horizon, and that gave us an idea. What if we simplify the problem by starting with customizing the texturing on pre-defined clothing, like drawing on a graphic tee!

This decision to use textures had a few great benefits. 

1. To make this work on our servers, all we needed to do is store a single 1 megapixel image for the front and back of each custom shirt. 

2. Since each custom shirt uses the same base material and geometry, we have fewer concerns about the look of Rec Room changing too much if the Rec Center is filled with custom shirts.

3. To make this work in the game, we needed to solve how to display textures in an optimized way so we could have up to 40 different custom shirts in a single room. 

This is a much easier problem than getting costumes to work across the game, but there were still some challenges of having this work across the 9 different platforms we support.

For example, we needed to ensure that wearing custom shirts didn’t cause performance issues on mobile devices. To show a custom shirt on an avatar, we need to compress the image on that shirt - a way for us to reduce the file size of that image. However, what happens if 40 people enter a room, all wearing custom shirts that we need to compress? Would the game crash?

We needed to answer this question before adding a way to make custom shirts. So, before we made the clothing customizer - or any kind of creation process - we needed a prototype!

Our first instinct was to grab an image, put it on a shirt, compress it, and see what happened. Because we didn’t have any drawn custom shirts yet, we decided to just use the player’s profile picture. Behold, the very first “custom shirt”

Truly horrifying

We repeated this process 40 times and did some profiling on it. Luckily, we found that the image compression didn’t cause any major problems. This gave us a good signal that once we added hand-drawn shirts into the game, we wouldn’t see any major changes in room performance.

What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Authoring Question

Examples of some beautiful 2D art our players make using the existing drawing tools

We had confidence that a lot of different kinds of creators can make great 2D drawings on the art canvases that have been in Rec Room for years.

By making a graphic tee be a new kind of canvas, it made it super easy for a wide range of creators to get started. When we launched Custom Shirts, we were seeing compelling new avatar content almost immediately. In the first 41 hours, more than 71,000 shirts were published! At the peak there were more than 3,700 shirts created PER HOUR across approximately 1,000 unique RR+ players ! In the 4 months since the feature has been released, over 400k custom shirts have been published.

Since Custom Shirts was released in June of this year, over 400k custom shirts have been published.

If we launched a feature where customization required using a Makerpen to draw 3D shapes on a costume mannequin, there’s no way we would have attracted this magnitude of creation. Having more creators use the feature means we can learn more about what they want.

We want to get to a place where players can eventually use 3D shapes to create the things they wear, but since our end game is to create a rich ecosystem with a large variety of creators, it feels right that our first customization feature had a lower bar to entry.

The problem is that this lower bar to entry is what leads us to the next problem. Because it’s easier for creators to customize what they wear into the Rec Center, it’s also easier for bad actors to violate the Code of Conduct in a public room.

The Code of Conduct that all players agree to when they sign up

Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about the The Moderation Question

“We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would take until an inappropriate shirt was published. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.”

From the first design doc, we knew that once we made it easy to draw anything on an avatar’s shirt, it would be a matter of minutes after releasing the feature that the first inappropriate shirt was published. We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would be. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.

What we didn’t want is to overwhelm our moderation team with so many inappropriate shirts that we lose our community’s trust in our ability to maintain our Code of Conduct.

We weren’t sure the extent of how many bad actors would emerge, or what tools we would need to manage them. But we knew that avoiding the problem wasn’t an option if we wanted to go after the grander ambition.

We did a few things to manage the risk:

Only creators with a RR+ subscription could publish and wear shirts. We thought the players who are more bought in to Rec Room (literally) would be less likely to create content that violates the CoC. And for everyone who became an RR+ subscriber just so they could make an inappropriate shirt, thanks for helping pay our moderation team!

We wrote enough tooling so our moderation team could easily address issues as they are reported, our in-game moderators could have insta-ban hammers, and anyone who had a bad reputation or a custom shirt under moderation review would be disallowed from publishing any more shirts.

For our first release, we made it so our players could publish shirts that only they could wear. So if an inappropriate shirt appeared on our platform, it couldn’t easily spread to other players.

Of the 400k custom shirts created so far only around 1.7% shirts have been reported and moderated. That’s still higher than we would like (that’s about 6,800 shirts!), but within reason that our world class moderation team has been able to manage it. It’s also helped inform how to improve our tooling including helping us write a feature to automate moderation using the training data from the last four months.

Now that we’ve built up our moderating muscle for Custom Shirts, it’s given us confidence that we can take our next step. It’s time to build a creator-driven avatar economy!

Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about The Economy Problem

Shortly after we released the ability to make custom shirts in the dorm room, something really interesting happened.

^MorbMachine, a room that used the clothing customizer to print Morbius shirt designs using circuits and gizmos, started topping the charts. It became one of our most popular rooms within a day. This was a surprise to us for a couple of reasons:

We hadn’t intended for the clothing customizer to be usable outside of the dorm room, and

People were VERY excited about this room and the custom shirts it created.

^MorbMachine, along with other shirt-printing rooms, quickly became a hit on the platform. We proudly wore our Morbius shirts in-game. Every day was Morbin Time! But more than anything, this room helped us realize that we really needed a way for players to share their shirts with each other.

Proudly showing off a community made custom shirt from the ^MorbMachine room

Unfortunately, we found a bug that was causing a 10% increase in crashes. In order to fix this, we needed to stop initializing the customizer upon entering most rooms, meaning it could no longer be spawned outside of a dorm.

But this would break ^MorbMachine. None of us wanted to do that. We decided the best compromise would be allowing any rooms currently using the feature to continue using it, as long as they didn’t update the room. In the future, we may let creators turn on customizer spawning on a per-room basis, because we really don’t want these types of rooms to go away forever.

The viral success of ^MorbMachine and other custom shirt printing rooms has taught us a lot about the community. Rec Room players will always find a way to DIY. When custom shirts came out, we didn’t provide a marketplace to the community - the community did it themselves. That’s so cool!

We also learned a valuable lesson here: this feature is the start of a new type of Rec Room economy, so it’s important that we got the official marketplace right from the beginning.

Building a new economy is all about trust. If a creator utilizes their talent and spends their time to make a really cool item to sell, can they trust that they’ll be properly rewarded? If a player buys a custom shirt from the marketplace, can they trust they’re paying a fair amount? If a creator makes something that a lot of players want but it might have copyright material, can our creators and players trust that the situation will be handled appropriately?

We’ve worked hard to figure out pricing for the beautiful and engaging items our art team adds to the game. It’s been a challenge finding the right balance of setting an amount that players feel comfortable with, while also considering the business needs of the Rec Room team.

Launching the Custom Shirts marketplace is the first step towards handing off what we’ve learned to our creators.

In this next phase, these 3 potential pitfalls are keeping us up at night:

1. Creators might underprice their work which devalues their contribution to the platform. It also hurts other creators. Players will come to expect lower prices for high quality work, and it’s so hard to raise prices once those expectations are set.

2. If we allow everyone to start selling shirts, custom shirts might flood the market such that high quality work will get lost in the noise, and the sheer volume of supply will suppress value across the market.

3. We have a suspicion that many creators will make popular custom shirts with copyrighted material. The overhead of policing this kind of behavior could be unmanageable. Just like with moderation, if it goes unchecked, it will undercut the trust of an open marketplace.

To manage these pitfalls, we’re starting the market with a curated list of featured custom shirts. Creators can submit their shirts to be featured through the Ink Inc Discord (recroom.com/inkinc) in the #featured-custom-shirts channel.

We’re setting the minimum price of these featured shirts to 1,000 tokens and the maximum price to 10,000 tokens.

1,000 tokens is more expensive than the cheaper shirts we currently sell in the game store, but it is generally less expensive than the 5-star shirts with unique geometry and tie-ins to seasonal events & themes. We want creators to share in the success we've had selling avatar items, and a competitive price is a big part of helping make that happen.

This feels like the right amount to value the many hours our creators put into their work, and also keeps token prices within reason.

Our partnerships with creators and programs like Ink Inc have helped us understand better pricing for player made content - with Dorm Skins being the best example. We are continuing to listen to creator feedback and look at sales data to figure out how to make pricing work best for everyone.

By launching with a staff picked list, we will be able to manage how the marketplace starts off so we can grow trust among our creators and players. Just like with the moderation problem, we hope to learn what is working and what isn’t. Then we’ll gain the confidence to take it the next step - opening up the marketplace so players can buy directly from each other’s portfolios.

What’s Next?

Custom Shirts is the first step of a big plan to hand over content creation to our players. Over the next few months, we will learn a lot more about how to solve the 4 problems we talked about above. We’re also expecting to find new problems we haven’t even considered. How it all goes will inform what we ship next so we can keep learning and keep trust strong.

These are big problems that don’t have straightforward solutions. We can’t easily apply the same real world economy playbooks to a social gaming platform like Rec Room. We’re writing a new playbook as we pioneer trusted transactions in a player created game. It’s a daunting problem, but being on a frontier like this, defining what the marketplaces of the future will look like, is the reason why we joined the Econ Team.

Interested in joining us? We are hiring!
Econ Team Senior Software Engineer

Econ Software Engineer

Or take a look at other opportunities at Rec Room.

Showdown (Pt. 3)

Part 3: Game Design: Making Showdown look and sound AMAZING!

Art:

Once we got the design of the level feeling good it was time to make the map visually stunning with help from the Build Team and Art Team! Working under the direction of the Art Team, Sarsparilla Springs went from a concept and rough prototyped map to a town full of old Wild West architecture between the oak trees and desert rock of the chaparral. 

We used a mix of makerpen objects and assets created by the Art Team to fill in Showdown to make it look lived in. All the buildings were made with makerpen, along with the Scoreboard and interior decorations. The Art Team also helped in creating meshes for the train and weapons along with the terrain and tunnel system. We started with rough concept art and a hero image that we then used to guide the build team in building out the buildings, which you can see below!

The biggest challenge was how we successfully blended the assets made by the Art Team along with makerpen assets to create a world that matches the look and quality of past RROs. We’ll go more in depth with this in a future video coming to you super Soon™!

A lot of times the art and level design are happening at the same time. It was no exception here - in fact, working with the maker pen allowed us to continue to change and adjust level details all throughout the project.

One example of this would be the theater. It started as an orange box that we weren’t even going to be able to go into. As we built and the map evolved, though, it became the perfect place for our pre-game lobby. I remember the first time we roughly built out the theater balcony and we literally fell in love with that view of the town, so this is why it’s the first view of Showdown you get!

Sound:

So now we have the wonderful Wild West town of Sarsaparilla Springs where you can play 3v3 against your friends. The last key to fully bringing everything to life is sounds! 

With Showdown we wanted to really bring the world together with the sounds of the West, and the chaparral biome to be specific. There’s ambient sounds, music, and sfx playing throughout the whole map - I encourage you to walk around and listen to how the sounds change as you move throughout Sarsaparilla Springs.

You start in the theater with the piano playing and the sound of general ambience outside. As you walk around the map the distant sounds of eagles screeching and dry desert wind hit your ears. If you fall into the mine, everything instantly changes as you traverse the cold rocky caverns hearing rocks falling, a subtle echo, and maybe even a distant whisper.

All of this had to be created and added to the map to create what is called a soundscape. This is something that really helps bring a room to life. The easiest way to create a soundscape is to listen to whatever environment you are in - if you are outside you might hear a slight breeze with birds chirping and dogs distant barking, the quiet hum of an A/C unit, or even cars passing on the road. All of these sounds amount to a soundscape and make the environment you’re in feel more real.

Lastly, we had SFX and music. The music played during the game helps to get you in the Showdown mood. It also is an audible indicator of where the game is at - as you get towards the end of a Showdown round, the music starts to speed up. Using music as an audible indicator is a great way to supplement a visual cue happening in game. The SFX are everywhere on the map. We have the weapons of course and each one has a distinct character that we created with different reload and firing sounds. This is so you (and all the players around you) know what gun you’re firing and from where.

Sound is such an important part of the dev process and the sooner you can start to think about it and implement it into the maps you’re building, the better and more immersive they will be. Music also helps to create audible and emotional cues based on the type of music being played. I encourage all of you to try playing with sound in your rooms and also listen to Showdown and the other RROs on how the sound design is constructed. Good sound design will always be a huge plus to a room!

Thanks so much for reading our Showdown blog! We really hope y’all enjoyed it and took something away as well. This isn’t the end of behind-the-scenes looks though… keep your eyes peeled for more content coming your way before you can say “cowpoke”!

See ya real soon!

Showdown (Pt. 2)

Part 2: Game Design: Level Design, Systems = Fun!

Howdy and welcome back for the second of 3 parts to this Showdown series! Picking up where we left off last week, we’re gonna be talking about level design and the game systems. We’ve been watching feedback on Showdown the past week and looks like there’s tons of y’all out there yee’n and haw’n. A few cowpokes have been asking why the map is small and why it isn’t symmetrical, and while we mentioned a bit of that in the first blog, we talk about that more in depth in this one!

Level Design:

The town of Sasparilla Springs started off as a napkin sketch! As we began thinking about what ^Showdown would be we asked ourselves… what makes a good PvP map? How are we going to make something differentiated than our existing paintball and laser-tag maps that plays to the rock paper scissors concept of our weapon balancing?

The answer was to focus on team deathmatch exclusively over capture the flag. This opened up a few new avenues for us in the world of map mapping. 

1. We didn’t need to make a ‘sided’ map anymore. Asymmetric design could be our friend rather than foe. 

2. Approach avenues could be geared towards flanking and surprise over cover as you weren’t carrying a flag. 

3. We also wanted to add a cool interrupt into the game pace with the train. 

That napkin sketch quickly turned into an orthographic design which was refined a few times to bring down to a size that felt fast and furious.

A common inclination for map design is to go too big, especially for an arena shooter. We started a little too big with the map which wasn’t encouraging the speed and chaos we craved with Showdown. Games would take longer and the time to get a KO would be longer as well, so we shored up the perimeter and really focused on density. This led to shorter game times and we found players were hitting the 25 KO mark just around 4 minutes!

We knew that with the power of the makerpen we could quickly start getting a true feel for gameplay rather than designing on paper. Just a day or two into the project we were beyond paper and playing inside of our greybox map in Rec Room.

We quickly settled on a fairly cylindrical map with different, partially obstructed vertical layers. Players would be able to circumnavigate the map, but they’d need to either rise up or dip down through the 3 levels to do a full circumnavigation. We started to think carefully about cover and sightlines at this point as well.  

Sasparilla Springs is a series of 19th century mining town buildings, with accessible roofs, and tunnels below the town. We imagined a group of bandits escaping the jail, dynamiting their way into the bank, and escaping via train. This helped us frame where buildings might be placed relative to each other, and gave us a background for environmental storytelling as we built the map.

We also began to understand what weapons we’d be creating, and wanted the map to contain near, mid, and far combat zones to support our rock-paper-scissors style gameplay with the cork guns. This led us to carefully crafting our balconies and their sightlines so as to not overpower the center of the map with roof-top snipers. We also wanted to give revolver users a fighting chance in the tunnels and so a few longer underground sightlines means that it’s not always a sure win for shotgun users underground. 

Oh and hey, we figured we’d throw in some dynamic cover with the train just to mix things up mid-game. 

The collection of buildings, roofs, tunnels, and train lead to some really cool circular movement gameplay, where chaos can reign, and where organized teams can thrive if they work together, holding key buildings and angles on the map. 

Even with an organized team holding watch over the center of town, competing players still have many avenues of approach and attack by moving through the buildings and tunnels to sneak up behind high-ground holders or sniping them from far away.

Game Systems:

We won’t go into too much detail in this post about the systems since we will when we talk more in a later blog post about circuits, but once we had the foundation for our game we could focus on other systems to make the full game work. The main systems we used are:

• Game Manager - This was the main manager that told the game what state we were in. Pre Game, Intro Game, Game Start, Game End

• Scoreboard System - Kept track of all Hits and Outs by player, tallied them up, and showed on the scoreboard. It also was added to our variables for the leaderboard stats.

• Countdown timer System - Our 4 min timer that tracked how much of the game was left.

• Costume System - Costumes that are added to the players at the Game Intro to differentiate teams.

• Team System - The rest of the team system that splits all players into teams and notify what team you are on.

• KO Systems - Before de-spawning we need to notify you that you have been hit and show the classic KO skull over your head.

• Respawning Systems - Once you are KO’d this system drops your weapon, and de-spawns and respawns you to a new location with a fresh revolver in your hand.

• Audio System - Maintains and keeps track of all the audio on the map and when it should be playing.

• Train System - Controls the animation and Steam of the train coming onto the map

• Weapon Systems - The ability to pick up, drop, and swap weapons. Also we made it so you couldn’t dual wield the weapons in this game.

• UI Systems - All the buttons and visuals to tell the player information about the game. One cool new circuit allowed us to create an in-game HUD (Heads Up Display) To show Team hits, and the timer countdown while playing. No more having to look up at the scoreboard and getting hit!

Whew that’s a lot of systems! All of these systems working hard at once are what create a fun polished experience for the player to hop in and play ^Showdown with their friends! Even more is the thought and care put into each of these systems which we will talk about more in the next blog coming soon. Don’t miss it!

See ya real soon!

Updating our Screens Controls

Let’s face it, Rec Room is a weird game! Players in Rec Room enjoy all kinds of special capabilities, and unless you’re playing in VR, the whole suite of controls can be challenging to wrap your head around. Over time we’ve seen that just learning and remembering the basic controls is a major point of friction for our players. This is especially true for new players, but we also get this feedback from players who have been with us for years. Does Rec Room really have to feel so weird to play if you’re not in VR? We don’t think so, so we’re getting ready to roll out a big update to controls on all of our Screens platforms.

The primary goal behind this work is to make Rec Room feel like it was made with your device of choice in mind. Whether you’re playing on a PC, console, or touch screen, we want to lower the “cognitive load” of controlling the game. With these changes, picking up and playing Rec Room should feel much more familiar and cozy, like pulling on a comfy sweater.

We appreciate all the feedback you’ve sent us about controls, and we’re excited to improve them. Our goals with this blog are to 1) give you all advanced notice that Screens controls changes are coming, 2) for creators, to show you how to mark up the tools in your room if dual-wielding is important to your experience, and 3) provide a chance for you all to give us feedback on further improvements in the coming weeks.

Check it out!

How it works

The new Default control scheme is designed to be the best way to play Rec Room! It has one button to interact with things, and one button to drop things. If you’ve played first-person games before, these controls should feel very familiar. Yes, it’s more approachable for new players, but it’s also just simpler, more intuitive, and ultimately more enjoyable for everybody.

Some cool features of the new Default control scheme:

• Right-click on mouse or use left trigger on gamepad to aim (hooray!)

• Quickly swap tools with one input, rather than having to drop them first

• Dedicated reload button (did anyone know manually reloading was even possible before?)

• Holster shortcuts on Keyboard & Touch

• Share Cam and Maker Pen shortcuts on Keyboard & Touch

“But wait, is the old control scheme going away?”

We understand that some players really do like the existing controls. Or maybe you're just used to how things work, and you’d really just prefer to go on playing  like you have. We get ya! For this reason, we are keeping the existing control scheme as a Legacy option, and this is what you’ll start out on if you’ve played Rec Room before. It’s a similar mapping to the old controls, so you keep playing how you’re used to if that’s what you want. Legacy still has fully ambidextrous capabilities, but won’t be compatible with some of the all-new features.

For those who have more specific controls preferences, stay tuned! We are also working on rebindable Screens controls that you can dial in to your specific liking!

How Default controls work

The Default controls have one button to interact, but that doesn’t mean they can only use one hand! Which hand an object will be held in is determined by the object itself. For example:

Most objects are held in the right hand automatically

Some objects like a Paint Grenade or a Shield are held in the left hand automatically

And some objects let you pick up one in each hand, such as Dodgeballs, Swords, some Pistols, and the Trigger Handle

Supporting the new Default controls in UGC

All objects come with a default preferred hand that we author, but you can customize it to suit your own room too! 

Note: these object settings are exclusively for the benefit of players on screens; these changes have no impact on VR players.

By configuring an object, you can set the Screen Player Preferred Hand. The only thing this setting affects is how Default Screens controls interact with the object, so set it however you want most players to experience your room. This won’t affect VR or other Screens control schemes.

• Dominant - Default controls will hold this in the Dominant hand (typically right)

• Offhand - Default controls will hold this in the Offhand (typically left)

• Dual Wield - Held in the Dominant hand, or hold two Dual Wield objects at once (note: cannot hold a Dual Wield + a Dominant object)

Here’s a couple examples of how you might configure the objects in your room:

The room uses a Sniper and a tiny little Sword as a sidearm. Swords are Dual Wield by default, but Sniper is Dominant - so Default controls cannot hold both at once. There are two easy solutions; either make the Sniper Dual Wield so that both objects can be picked up by either hand depending on the order they are grabbed, or mark the Sword as Offhand and leave the Sniper as-is so it is always in the Dominant hand.

This room is basically Capture-the-Flag but with only Grenades! By default, the Flag and Grenades are all Offhand which is not ideal when Grenades are the star of this show. But by setting Grenades to Dominant, they will go to the opposite hand of the Flag. Another option would be to set the Grenade as Dual Wield, so the first one goes to the right hand but you can easily pick up two at once.

“All right, so what’s next?”

For the vast majority of players, once we roll out these new controls, life will go on very much like it has. Existing users will be on Legacy controls, and be able to switch once we complete our rollout. We will start easing all new players on to the Default controls, and so over time we should see a gradual shift toward a greater percentage of players using the new Default controls rather than Legacy.

If you are the creator for a room where dual-wielding is important to your experience, you’ll have time when the update goes out to be able to mark up the tools in your room, and ensure that everything is ready for Default controls before we roll them out to everyone. We’re still fixing bugs and harvesting feedback, so we don’t have exact dates to share yet, but be ready for when we announce the update so you have time to prep if this change affects your rooms! We appreciate your patience, and thanks again for all of your feedback on controls so far. Rollout dates coming soon!

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!