Chasing Cozy, and Finding It

Woooo... Seems appropriate. We released a thing on Steam! The team can ship! We’re learning about some of the edge cases we need to be better at. Mostly controllers it seems. And that’s good. That’s a real world problem with actual answers.

The worry was more that people would not like the actual “thing” we built. The vibe and the "why." But actually the feedback on that has been really nice. And actually kind of heart warming.

We hoped to hear that all-too-trendy term used these days —“cozy” - and we did! Can there be better feedback than that your game is cozy? Like a warm blanket or a purring cat.

We started this whole thing to make spaces in VR that people wanted to be in. To stay in and maybe come back to. Placemaking is really interesting. There are places (I the writer) have never been in. Places that do not actually exist. That I know as well as some favorite real world places. I know you turn left here there is a window. And if you look behind there is a table.

That sort of real world feeling that you can get from just experiencing a place with your headset is something special. Something new to the world. When we experienced it the first time, we wanted to do “cozy” things with it. To give people fond memories of places that we built by hand out of triangles and pixels.

And we have a long ways to go with technical aspects and world building. But the thesis, so far, is working. People are going _inside_ of the game and they are getting a reaction from that. And it seems to be a good one.

When you hear that. There is nothing to do but get right back to building.