VRChat world making: it's like the Sims for nerds!

My broke socially anxious college student ass neither uses VRChat socially nor has a VR headset. However, I've been playing the game for a while and love seeing the wonderful things that people come up with. And whenever I see something that I can make something for, I get an uncontrollable urge to make that something (evidence: I'm on SpaceHey). 

(And made a Live2D VTuber model once, and make VRoid models...)
(shameless VRoid model commission plug here.)

An important note is that VRChat makes it SUPER EASY to make and upload stuff. On my level, world building is basically just taking free assets off the internet and throwing them down. Some of them even have coding already applied. It's so magical, and people who make free things and put them on the internet are the literal backbone of society.

Anyways, my first foray into world making was in April or May of this year, when I stayed up a little too late a few nights and spat out this thing:


(sorry for camera bugging out)

This world had a few major problems. 

- Most importantly, it used a particle rain system prefab. I wanted rain. I tried to add a greenscreen raindrop texture to the windows manually, but I goofed it and it didn't work. This made my laptop run hot whenever I was in the world (yes, I'm using a laptop for this).
- The filesize was way too big for it being such a small world. It was only like a 60-something mb download size, but the world was super cramped. I think my problem was using mostly assets off the Unity store (the free section of course), which wildly varied in sizes themselves. Think putting a hyperrealistic toothbrush in your game, but less bad. (/ref)
-Because I was using free asset packs from the Unity store, I was throwing in all the tchotchkes that my little heart desired/had access to. Did I really need an incense burner with some sort of integrated heat-wobble effect? Hell naw.
-The room was badly laid out, the colliders were wonky, and I put a physics system on the pickups for some reason. I have a little worm brain that does not physics, so this made everything bounce around like a cylinder in a frictionless vacuum. It was super funny, but not very chill.

So I stewed around for a little while, dreading loading into this place as my homeworld every time, and I finally resolved to make something a little better for myself. This led to the creation of my most recent world in June.


If you hit those buttons, a few prefab game tables pop up on the rug!

Fun fact: the screen is set to autoplay Dankmus songs. 

I like this world a lot better! It's not as traditionally cozy, but it feels fun and, more importantly, runs better. There are still some issues though: even though the lighting is baked, I think the soft shadows are a problem. The mirror runs like molasses. 

All the credits are in the worlds themselves, which- oh wait...

>:(

If you see an asset here that you want me to point you to, just ask! All of them are free and are either from Booth (amazing resource with a lot of VRC-specific stuff) or the Unity Asset store. Major shout-outs to all of Mobubbler's stuff, the holographic material pack, the window raindrop shader, the in-world post-processing menu, and the amazingly cute sharpie-looking markers.

I hope that I geeked out enough for all you world-builder nerds out there but not enough to scare off the average Joe. I'm still a huge beginner at this sort of thing, so I'd absolutely take some pointers!

Stay cozy, drink some water, and try to make yourself laugh today! :D

Song of the day: - P U T T I N G - C H A L L E N G E - by Dankmus