It’s been a long road, and I’ve made quite a few things during the past eight years on VRChat. Some years I’ve been more active than others, but I never really did stop creating from the moment I gained access way back in 2018.
I don’t quite remember the exact date, but it was shortly after my official join date in 2018. I had sampled the sights in VRChat before that time as another user, but in January of 2018 I made the user account I have kept until this day.
At first I met many strange and, usually awful people. A lot of kids and childish adults were on the platform being as racist, sexist, and homophobic as possible to get a reaction. In the early days VRChat’s own Discord chat moderators encouraged me to not rock the boat, telling me, “Tupper is trans so it’s all good!”
That soon changed, however. I met a lot of great people in a group called Kemocafe, and soon I helped run a group for a streamer named Nyarth!
These little communities helped me reach out to others who also saw the creative potential of VRChat. It was a world of infinite possibilities and instant gratification in the form of helpful feedback and criticism.
I had tried game development as a hobby before hopping on to VRChat for the first time and the feedback from the world at large was mostly… meh. Nobody would comment on my work and sometimes I would get a like or two. I didn’t have the friend group or critical mass of followers who were interested in my hobbies.
Once I joined VRChat I quickly found the group called Community Meetup. A group who meets every Sunday at 4PM EST until 6PM to share the latest creations of its members.
This group is full of brilliant people. I am always amazed at what people are pulling off. Many great assets which are used by the folks who create for VRChat at large were first shown off to the world at Community Meetup. Shaders have always fascinated me, and watching Pi show off the entire RISC CPU with a Linux kernel running in a compute shader was stunning.
When the pandemic wiped out the 2020 convention year and shut down the hotel to all in-person gatherings, Igglypou rallied a team of creators to rebuild the entire experience in VR. I jumped in immediately, excited to contribute whatever small assets the talented group of game developers she’d gathered—thanks to her husband’s industry connections—might need.
By November 2021, things were moving along smoothly. But over time, the replies on Discord grew fewer and farther between. As often happens when I’m in a group project, I instinctively picked up the slack. The show must go on, I kept telling myself.
And go on it did. I churned out assets at a furious pace and eventually helped assemble the unfinished parts of the worlds. When we had to compress everything down to 100MB—and just 50MB for Meta Quest users—the real challenge began. We built six worlds, initially designed by the other team members, then decorated by Igglypou, myself, and whatever time her husband could spare.
When even they became too busy, I took it upon myself to continue optimizing the worlds and keeping nearly 70 exhibitor booths up to date.
Looking back, I’m struck by how much work it really was. At the time, though, it simply became part of my routine: come home, have dinner with my partner, and from 7PM to 8PM (or often much later, well past my bedtime) dive back into the convention.
When the event finally happened, I didn’t feel proud of what I’d accomplished. That’s a familiar ADHD trap—focusing on what wasn’t perfect instead of what I actually achieved. I was happy the show ran, and grateful for the help of my friend Commander A9 and others as we dealt with crashers and griefers. I owe Commander A9 a lot.
Mostly, I just felt relief that it was over. Pride didn’t come until much later. In retrospect, I can see how unreasonable that self-criticism was, but in the moment, all I cared about was doing everything I could to make it happen.
Because of the work I put into the 2022 convention, I was offered the chance to lead the department the following year. It was an honor, but also a challenge. The support we’d had from the live convention in 2022 simply wasn’t there in the years that followed, and suddenly I found myself in far deeper waters than before. I wasn’t just organizing the VR side anymore—I was also trying to coordinate with the in-person team to get video content from the physical convention and pipe it into the VR experience.
It was a lot to juggle, and I often felt like I was building the plane while flying it. But I kept pushing, determined to make the VR side feel connected to the real-world event even when the infrastructure around me was thin.
Unfortunately the support from the AV booth was not forthcoming, not because of any malice, but because their plates were already overfull.
This experience left a sour taste in my mouth, and I quit the convention that year.
Since then I’ve created a lot of worlds for the fully VR convention CozyCon which Temrin Sanjem runs from Vancouver. It’s a general fandom convention with a smaller following, but it feels really rewarding.
I’ve rambled enough already, but I’m grateful for all of the opportunities that VRChat has afforded me to share my creativity with the world.
Here’s to another 8 years!