Creation Roles
The Problem
While Rec Room offers an amazing environment for social creation, it comes with challenges. Creators have the freedom to collaborate openly, but this requires a high level of trust between participants. Many players are eager to learn and start their journey as creators, and Rec Room encourages this by allowing users to host their own creative classes and workshops, earning rewards for helping others develop their skills.
However, these spaces can sometimes be problematic, as creators have the ability to delete or steal others' work, leading to significant moderation challenges.
Design Solution
To address this, we focused on providing creators with robust moderation tools tailored to collaborative creation. Our goal was to ensure these tools supported growth and served diverse purposes, rather than catering to only a niche part of the community. This effort marked an important step in evolving our in-app systems to create a safer and more productive public creative environment.
Public Collaborative Creative Space
In Rec Room, Roles are used in the game system to assign players unique abilities. For example, interacting with specific objects in a room can grant powers like flying, louder speech, or higher jumps.
We leveraged this existing system to grant Maker Pen access (Rec Room's creative tool) to room owners. This enabled room owners to design custom systems for assigning Maker Pen permissions, tailored to their specific needs, rather than being restricted by a one-size-fits-all feature.
Room owners can set up different roles for their players and customize creation role options. Players can interact only with objects either created under their assigned role or tagged with a role filter applied by the room creator. Each role automatically applies a role filter to any objects created under it, ensuring players can only interact with objects tagged with their role filter.
Player A: Player A is assigned the Creator1 role in a room full of other players. Player A can now draw shapes while they are using their Maker Pen.
Player B: Player B is assigned the Creator2 role and pulls out their Maker Pen. Starts creating but wants to delete the work of another creator. Player B attempts to delete the work of Player A but nothing happens. Their pointer just goes through all objects made by Player A. Player B wants to then delete the room’s floor, points the Maker Pen at the floor but the pointer does not interact with the floor. Player B decides to get more clever and pulls out a respawner gadget and adds the #makerpenobject (cannot spawn shapes without the role filter applied) and nothing happens.
Players group C: Two players were assigned the Creator3 role and they pull out their Maker Pens and start creating a snowman. Both creators can interact with each other’s work because they have the same role filter.
Players cannot interact with role filters or roles outside their assigned roles.
Every object created by the player in a role will have a role filter applied, and players with that role can only interact with objects that have that role filter.
If a player with a creative role adds tags to their objects, they can create complex logic with those tagged objects, as the role filter will be applied. Other players with different roles will not be able to interact with the logic, but the room owner can step in if there are any issues.
Players cannot create logic to spawn other players with different creative roles, helping to prevent trolling and disruption.
Since creative roles are designed to meet the needs of room owners for teaching and creating fun collaborative experiences, room owners can design their rooms to accommodate zone creation, individual creations, multiplayer creation, and open room creation not tied to specific locations. This flexibility allows room creators to keep their experiences open and versatile, using one system instead of a restrictive one.
Creative Roles Next Steps
Creator roles have served creators well, but they now want to do even more with them. These creative roles are designed for success for future iterations, such as:
Toggling off features in the Maker Pen Palette.
Setting up robust tutorial experiences, all created by the creative community.
These can be added to gameplay to create experiences like build-a-bear games, object-based games, creative timer games, charades, and creative battle games.
These are the kinds of features creators desire moving forward, and this system helps meet and grow with those needs.
Measure Success
Creative Roles Template Room: Room ^MakerPenClass_Template has 144,370 clones.
Workshops: Creators host hundreds of workshops each year, and they rely on creation roles to do so.
Release: November 10 2022
