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!

The actual game entry is at https://lilithebowman.itch.io/feed-the-cats

• Upgrade old Virtual Furnal Equinox worlds from 2021 through 2023 to newer Unity / VCC
• Godot lessons I purchased a while ago. I’ve finished most of the 2D ones, but job hunting…
• Job hunting keeps me busy a lot
• Re-writing my resume based on conflicting criteria from basically everyone
• Finding out it’s really the good old fashioned networking thing that actually gets the goods
• Electronics projects basically all the time:
  • Got a bunch of $80 giant caps from a friend (Mepix) which could be used for fun mischief
  • Got a relay and a bunch of super capacitors (3V 1f) from Mepix as well
  • 3D printing hat hangers for Biku
  • Set up a security camera so I can take fun timelapses out my window
  • Found a few 4K TVs being thrown out, and I like to try to diagnose them for fun
    • Gave a friend a 4K TV for his birthday that only needed a 90 cent part to fix
  • Made a battery bank out of 18650 cells that were perfectly good which someone threw out a whole box of
• Painted a cute little mural on our kitchen wall
• Re-decorating our apartment after the whole bed bug fiasco in this building
• Hung a lot of art while trying to give each room careful consideration
• Stared into the void because the ‘muricans voted that orange turd in again
• Laughing into the void because ‘muricans are all women now (actually non-binary)
• Took up doing some Brilliant lessons because the YouTube ads finally got to me (it’s fun!)
• Surpassed 1500 days of streak in Duolingo for Japanese! No I’m not fluent but much better!
• Took up Coddy because one unknown YouTuber talked about it and it sounded fun
  • The C++ coding challenges are fun since I haven’t touched that much since Trent University
• Read a book on React to sharpen my skills while looking for jobs
• Rewrote a lot of my personal website in React, then shelved that because I have too damn many projects!
• Helping out with and/or attending local furry events
• Working on 3D models for the next CozyCon event happening in September

There’s probably far more, but sometimes it’s helpful for me to write out what I’ve accomplished, so I don’t feel defeated by the brain worms.

What does your list look like?

While I’ve been struggling to find work for over a year now, I’ve been keeping fresh by doing tutorials in various computer related disciplines. I’ve been brushing up on my React skills by reading some great books mentioned in a previous post, but I’ve also bought a Godot tutorial pack from https://www.gamedev.tv/

I started the 2D tutorial a while ago before Cozy Cretaceous and put it down when I had to focus on that. But now that I have some time before Christmas, when it seems as if the job hunt can take a bit of a pause, I’m using my time to work on it again.

Overall the 2D tutorial is very simple, and the core concepts are of course all things that I already know, but having a guided tour through the Godot development experience is very nice. If I were to give it a rating, I would probably give it a 4 out of 5.

I only remove one point for not having a summary of the changes made at the end of each lesson like Unity has at the end of all of their in-house tutorials. I think that’s a nice touch and a way to keep things fresh for the learners.

So check it out if you are interested. I think it’s definitely worth the price of admission.

I need work

On the job hunt front, Toronto has been a desert of employment ever since the large swath of layoffs started last year. I picked a really silly time to give up my previous job, but I had my reasons why I needed to resign.

I’m hoping things start to look up in Ontario, but with how things are going, I feel as if it is only going to get worse before it gets better.

That said, does anyone have tips for applying to jobs overseas? Do you have any ideas for places that are starved for talent? Let me know in the comments!

Gotta Be Productive

Finally, I’ll leave you with this musical interlude by MattstaGraham.

You can play with a demo of the Cream the Rabbit Mechanim test here.

It was actually fairly painless. If you name the bones in your armature the same as they are in the Mechanim dialogue it automatically links everything up!

The only downsides I see, is that there is definitely some tweaking to be done around the weight painting in the model.

When the model initializes, her back juts way out because the arms are somehow linked to the back of her dress.

You can also see both eyes inexplicably bob up and down as she runs. Really strange! She’s also frowning which I believe is related to the default pose as well, despite her not having any bones (armature anchor points) directly related to the mouth.

All in all it seems pretty simple to set up, though.

You can play with a demo of the Cream the Rabbit Mechanim test here.

I’ll have to figure out a way to screencast my keypresses. Somehow the default blender functionality for this isn’t working.

At 1458 tris, it will be able to convey enough visual information to be interpreted as a rubbish bin without using too much GPU power. This will be fairly small when it’s placed in the project.