Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Above: Lobby Cam in Steam/Unreal. See below for the SL version

Lobby Cam by Bryn Oh is a free new game experience on Steam, and like the name suggests, it's actually created by famed Second Life artist Bryn Oh. Since publishing it to Steam last Friday, it's garnered 7,2000 downloads — quite a lot, for an indie developer on the platform, and a bit better than the visits her experiences get in Second Life. (Which range from 300-1000 a day, she tells me.)  

Steam only publishes games, so Bryn added a mini quest, but also decided to keep it free to play: "There are things such as a HUD for the letters you find and you can pick up and inspect some models on tables, lots of little things," she tells me. "I was able to monetize it but I chose to make it free. I figure people can support me on my Patreon if they like what I do."  

This is a really exciting move. I'm a huge advocate of Second Life creators expanding to other platforms so they can build their audience and market. It's also very cool to see her SL creation transformed to Unreal. (Compare and contrast the pics in this post.)

"Most of the changes involve aesthetics," she tell me. "Unreal Engine is a really powerful tool where you can spend lots of time on the minute details ranging from how shadows should bounce off an object to creating dozens of layers of ground textures."

While Unreal's graphics are incredibly powerful, her Second Life version has an innovative feature that couldn't make the transition to Steam (possible spoiler ahead):

Above: Lobby Cam in SL. See above for the Steam/Unreal version

"The main difference overall is that Lobby Cam in Second Life has a narrative where the visitor collects parts, pen, paper, envelope and stamp in order to write a letter to one of the characters in the story named Fern. When they write this letter and mail it in a mailbox on the sim it went to my email and I would write a reply (as Fern) to their letter and this reply was the end to the story. So each person had a part in ending the story depending on what they wrote."

In the Second Life version, "I replied to over 700 letters. In Unreal Engine I had no idea how to do this and to be honest there would be way more than 700 letters to reply to which is a huge undertaking. Because of this I wrote a single ending to the story."

Her advice for other SL artists interested in expanding to Unreal:

"I would advise them to buy a bottle of Tylenol.  Actually honestly as with any 3D program I would just say that if you wanted to learn it you should do tutorials daily and don't allow yourself to quit.  I talk to many people who tell me they are going to learn a program like Zbrush or Maya and they quit after two weeks because it seems too hard to do.  In my case I felt like I was not smart enough to learn them, but after a few months suddenly things begin to 'click' and you start to remember how to do things without having to look it up… it begins to come naturally to you. 

"So my advice is to hold on until you get to this magical clicking point."

Download it for free here. I just tried it out; the imagery and environmental layout is gorgeous, evocative, and suitably a bit creepy. As a Steam experience, I'd say the game-like aspects and UI could be made a bit more visible, to encourage people to play more, with some visual cues to progress people further into the world. I'd love more enveloping sound propagation (footsteps, water splashing, leaves, and so on), but maybe she's going for a more muted, dreamlike effect. In any case, it's a great start to something I hope becomes a trend.