Homeworld Complex Evo Guide

[Rita Seliba]

00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, this is episode number 13 out of 35 of that series, and the fifth out of five of looking at the context of place, home, and the environment. So this piece is called Complex 7, which is a VR chat world by Fens, who last year had a piece called District Roboto. This is kind of like the sequel to that, where you're in this kind of speculative sci-fi world where robots have kind of taken over and there's not really a lot of humans around. And so you're kind of exploring around these different cities where these robots are living in them. And so the primary contextual domain is looking at this sense of home. You start off in a comfy home, but I think this piece is actually also got this kind of adventure component because you're going off into the cityscape and you're actually going through a lot of these liminal spaces from where you go from your home and out into the streets and you're kind of commuting throughout the course of your neighborhood. So there's kind of a neighborhood context, but also the larger city. And in the center of the city, there's kind of a fusion between nature and these different cityscapes. So this is the first draft of the piece. Finns actually isn't finished with the piece. He's going to be launching the official released version for Raindance this year. But this was a first take of being able to go through this transition of starting in a home, kind of like this comfy home, and all the things that Finns is trying to do with trying to create this comfortable home, and then these kind of liminal transitional spaces into this more cityscape. So the primary center of gravity of presence is it's very much an environmental experience of very exquisite lighting throughout the course of this piece. And you have the sense of embodied presence just by the nature of being within VRChat. You have these different avatars and are able to kind of move around with a sense of your own embodiment. And also there's a lot of environmental storytelling that's happening in here. And there's a lot of mental presence trying to figure out what the deeper backstory and the context is for this world that he's created. As he moves forward, he's going to have more explicit things that you can start to read from these different robots and get different dialogue to get a lot more context for this world and how it came to be. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Fens happened on Thursday, August 31st, 2023 at the Venice Immersive Festival in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:36.963] Fins: Hi. Yeah, I'm Vince, and I'm a world creator. I used to be a 2D concept artist, a freelancer, but I recently joined VRChat as a 3D artist, and currently I'm making immersive world. That's about it.

[00:02:56.128] Fins: Yeah, so five years ago I downloaded VRChat after I saw it on YouTube and I've been always the kind of guy who loved making like world and maps and little custom games and building even sims, the sims and all that kind of stuff. So when I found out that you can make like environment and you can invite people to it on VRChat, I was sold. Like instantly I got talking to it and I downloaded the game and I got started. But at the time, I wasn't that good with 3D creation. I was a 2D artist at heart. So 3D was a bit challenging for me to get into. Even though I have some previous experience in playing around, not like professionally, but playing around with like Blender for my concept art and doing some basic game engine stuff like Unity was like completely new to me. But yeah, it's been a journey of five years. And well, last year I was hired by VRChat and become a full-time professional 3D artist.

[00:03:49.673] Kent Bye: Nice. And how many other artists or world builders does VRChat have on their roster? Just me. Just you. So you're the only world builder. So any world that's in VRChat and the official releases probably have your fingerprints on it?

[00:04:17.584] Kent Bye: Great. And so I know we had a chance to talk about some of your experiences that you had at Venice last year. And so let me talk about how this project was a follow-on sequel from one of the worlds that you had created last year called District Roboto, which I guess was inspired to some extent by the video game of Stray. So maybe you could give the lineage of inspiration for how we got to here this year.

[00:04:37.578] Fins: Yeah, of course. So Koala, the person who was the co-founder of the game Stray, is kind of like my spiritual mentor when it comes to lighting. I discovered him back in 2017 or 16. I was like playing around with Unreal Engine. So I browsed the forums and I saw him giving out all those lighting tutorials and projects that you can download and open it in your own Unreal Engine. And I was just amazed by the lighting that he did. at the time, so I was absorbed, but at the time I was also still mostly a 2D artist, so I wasn't getting that much into it. But over the years, he made a pitch for a game called Project HK, I think it stands for Hong Kong, and I was immersed in how he built the lighting in that world. And there was this very prototype scene that he built with a little robot and some cat walking around. It's very simple but the lighting was amazing even though there was no texture whatsoever. So down the line, even though I've been waiting for the project to complete, I knew it was coming. And I wanted to make a little homage, a little love letter. to the very person who inspired me to take on the journey to become like a 3D artist and a lighting artist. So I made District Roboto which is like heavily inspired by Stray and a lot of it were like reference to the world of Stray and you have robot and you have cats. It's very much the same. Same with like Complex 7. Complex 7 was like a sequel to that because like Roboto was a nice world, but it was just all visuals, right? People come in here, nice robot, nice lighting, but people don't really understand the world. Like, why robot? Why cats? Why is it like this? And Complex 7 is to expand on that, to take my own little twist on my own universe and why the world is the way it is right now. So it's more narrative in environment, the whole telling, more narrative based. When it finish, there will be gameplay and more piece that help people understand the world better.

[00:06:37.545] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. So you, I had a chance to get a little sneak peek guided tour from you before coming out to Venice, which I thought was really helpful because you're adding a lot of the other context of the different scenes and a little bit of the backstory. And so imagine though that by the time the piece comes out, you're going to have a lot of that. That's either like, I guess, how are you going to tell, part of that story relative to when you were giving me a guided tour, you're able to explain everything, but how do you expect that people are going to experience aspects of that environmental storytelling or are there going to be little audio snippets or little pieces of text or is it all just going to be embedded into the environment for people to extrapolate what this world may be like?

[00:07:17.872] Fins: So, when it comes to environmental storytelling, I try to make it as accessible as possible, right? Because VRChat, unlike Sandlot game, VRChat is an international global phenomenon where everyone come and enjoy the world and I try to make it in a way that transcends language barrier. and in a way that people understand it. So even though there's gonna be English and text in here that requires some understanding, I hope in a way that I can reinforce a universal feeling where people can look at that and they understand exactly what's going on. So hopefully in the final version I can make that more clear. And also I plan on add narrative to the NPC, give them more personality. Maybe they're going to be chat box and stuff. Of course, I'm going to try to have as much localization as possible, translation to different language. A lot of my fans are from other community, like Japanese or Korean community, where sometimes they can't enjoy the world as much. And I take the effort to try to include translation. And I found it to be very effective because sometimes they feel that they are left out. So yeah, in the final projects, the robot probably will talk to you in some capacity. They will give you like fresh quests, give you little side quests here and there. Kind of like, I would say, encourage you to try to form a relationship with this robot, like the way that you form a relationship with a human. And for doing that, you are rewarded with like more place to explore or place that you didn't think that were accessible now is accessible. And the more you do that, the more the story open up and the story make more sense as you do that.

[00:08:59.340] Kent Bye: Yeah, more follow-ons for where you see the future of those chatbots, but first I want to set a bit more context of the piece because I feel like it's kind of in like three major parts that I see where you're in this really cozy home and you know that's a whole genre within VRChat of the comfy places for people to set as their home worlds, but then you have a whole city that you go outside and then you're entering into this whole other realm where you're more in this liminal space of kind of in between these different complexes and you go through an abandoned complex and then eventually you get to what I'd say is the centerpiece climax of the I guess architecturally and spatially you have this big vast tree in the middle of this town square I guess with a lot of these buildings so it's kind of like this really vast architecture so you're moving from really constrained spaces to somewhat more open and then like really wide open so love to hear a little bit more about this world and a little bit more context as to what's happening in this world.

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