What's next: 6 months in

I was originally going to make this a "behind-the-scenes" post but I figured it would be better for everyone in the Patreon to be able to see, so hey! Welcome to "What's next: 6 months in"!

It has now been around 6 months since I've launched this Patreon and the reception it has gotten has absolutely astounded me:

• ~250 active members on Patreon

• 3550+ users on the Discord server

• 2660+ users on the VRChat group

I did not expect it to grow that big that fast but I'm grateful you're all here!

What more, Trash Compactor, the map which really turned the Patreon around is still fairly popular at around 500 players peak per day, its next update is coming this week and while I've loved updating it with new stages & modifiers these past few months I think it's time to look to the future and take on a new project...

Disclaimer: this doesn't mean Trash Compactor will stop receiving updates!!! If there is a stage or modifier I deem really interesting I will definitely come back to add it!

So what's next? What worlds am I going to pour my work into now? Glad you asked:

Panopticon

Panopticon is the codename for my next project, that might end up being the actual name, I'm not 100% sure yet. Funny enough this was supposed to be the world to make the Patreon shine, but then Spookality and Trash Compactor happened.

But what is Panopticon in the first place? Around the time of the Patreon's creation I was playing Roblox with friends and we randomly ended up on a game called "Death Penalty" and I really really loved the concept of it. It pits you against other players in a series of minigames ranging from Simon Says, Split or steal, plain voting and so on...

I felt like that game could really thrive in VRChat and I had some ideas of how that would look like, so prior to opening the Patreon I poured some work into it but never completed a working prototype, albeit a lot of the elements I made got re-used for Trash Compactor like the screen.

So the first step is to do just that: prototype it, then go in random Trash Compactor instances and get people to help me test it, see if it is viable as a world in the first place.
It is possible that later down the line I might organize a Patreon members only test, if you all would be interested.

Scanless

If you're an Extra Supporter or higher then you already know (and may have tested?) Scanless, it is a world that is really dear to my heart and that I would absolutely love to work on!

Unfortunately the caveat is that its whole premise kind of goes against my Patreon as it would most likely not even be possible to release on Quest and would probably not benefit from any Patreon perk being added to it (well except maybe commentaries but I'm not sure that's a popular offering).

As such, work on Scanless is still paused unless I manage to come up with a breakthrough so that it can at the very least be Quest compatible.

Spookality 2025?

There are currently no drafted plans for Spookality 2025 and I'm not sure what there could be, I feel like the Meat Grinder trilogy got capped off nicely with Trash Compactor and I can't think of another idea that would involve the trilogy's systems (physical player controller, physical platforms) and be better than Trash Compactor.

But also in a way that means I can do a world that doesn't involve those systems, which could be interesting in its own right! And maybe this year's theme will make a lightbulb appear over my head, you never know!

Circle

Circle is a world I've never talked about on the Patreon, it's based on the movie of the same name "Circle" (2015), in it fifty people awaken in a dark room and discover that they're voting for the next person to get eliminated every two minutes, so they quickly start forming alliances based on their personal beliefs.

I always wondered how people in VRChat would form their alliances and the world on paper is dead simple to make, but unfortunately back when I had the idea, Udon was still in the early days and it was really hard to execute especially because there were a lot of special conditions (eg. ties).

But now, Udon is better than ever! And some of the recent updates have made networking incredibly easy, so I might try to give it a shot at making a working prototype and test it to see if it's viable. Unfortunately that one doesn't feel like it could have any Patreon perk either, but at least it's 100% Quest compatible!

Ebon Hawk

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is one of my favorite games ever, as such back in my early days of VRChat content creation I painstakingly got the models of the main ship (called the Ebon Hawk) from the game and reconstructed it in VRChat with as much attention to detail as I could to make it absolutely faithful to the game down to different sound effects triggering on a specific delay.

Unfortunately, I did get employed and I felt I had to take it down as being an employee with this kind of content was not a good look... But I'm not anymore! Which means I can bring it back like I did Mad Moxxi's bar (from Borderlands 2, you can find it on my VRChat profile)!
Buuuuut it's running SDK 2 and an audio update kind of broke everything several years ago, so maybe over one week I can get it back and running with Udon and reupload it.

I may make a BTS on a minigame I made for that world, which was a working Pazaak table (roughly equivalent to blackjack) using SDK 2 triggers and animators. If you don't know what SDK 2 triggers are, basically imagine if I had to make a working pinball machine with rocks, sticks and some gum.

That's it! That's the current lineup of worlds I could work on, unless I suddenly get an interesting idea that is better than all of them, which one are you most excited about? Which one do you think I should focus more? Let me hear it in the comments or on Discord in #supporter-chat!