- Illuminate a world of darkness with Spraycans of Light
- Multiplayer
- Created in December 2022
- Available in VRChat as a Public World
- Developed solo with some help for bug testing
- Using VRChat proprietary visual scripting language "Udon"
- Multiplayer
- Created in December 2022
- Available in VRChat as a Public World
- Developed solo with some help for bug testing
- Using VRChat proprietary visual scripting language "Udon"
I didn't really set out to make this project but instead got randomly inspired during one of my explorations of the many worlds of VRChat. Because of this I had to learn a lot of new things to get this to work: this was my first VR project, my first project using Udon (VRChats proprietary scripting language), my first multiplayer project and my first project using visual scripting. Because of this there were a lot of quirks that I needed to figure out about each of these things: how to get Udon to properly syncronize the structures between clients, how to make sure the spraycans were going off at roughly the same time, how to handle the object pools for the cans... all in all it took close to two weeks of debugging to get everything working smoothly and reliably and along the way many a bodge and change in approach was neccessary to accomplish this.
The object pools especially were quite tricky: Originally I planned to just spawn and destroy cans but then I learned that Udon would not allow me to spawn synchronized objects. This meant I had to swap to an Object Pool approach; however it proved quite tricky to set the color of the particle system and material of the cans on spawn, so I had to set up seperate pools for each color of can and then keep track of the number of spawned cans separately.
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The Idea
The inspiration for this project came from a can of rainbow coke in one of the worlds I hung out in with friends. When used the can sprayed colorful and bright particles which gently floated to the ground. I was mesmerized by the effect and spent close to 10 minutes on my own off to the side just spraying around the particles. I loved how the particles covered the floor but they disappeared after a few seconds. I wondered about what if the particles stuck around and what if you could cover things in them? Could you draw with them or maybe outline something? Could I illuminate an entire scene with just these particles?
Findings in Cooperative Exploration
The base concept for this world was loosely inspired by "The Unfinished Swan" from 2012. However there are some key differences, namely the lack of a conventional story, a much less restrictive environment and the addition of multiplayer. That last one was especially important to me; VRChat is a social platform first, many of the most popular Worlds are simply nice hangout spots or social experiences so I wanted to make sure this experience built on that. This meant the final experience would be a
Funnily enough I actually stumbled into a solution to this problem: There are limitations on the spraycans, how many there can be and how much "paint" is in each. These are for the technical limitations of VRChat, to ensure the performance doesn't suffer too much. However these limitations also turned out to be a great way to encourage groups to stick together: the limited resources encouraged planning and discussion about where to use paint and when to refill or reset cans. If cans were unlimited players would simply pick up a can and run around on their own.
The hidden structures were also a big part of encouraging social behavior: They provided a clear goal for the group to explore and more importantly speculate about. As players uncover walls and floors of the structure they immediately speculate about it: where are the entrances, what is the shape, is there a pattern
