At Rec Con last year, we talked about our big dreams for improving how you can express yourself and your identity in Rec Room. At that point, we’d just released the upgraded bean avatar - which was a prerequisite for the deeper customization features we wanted to get to.
We’ve got a series of updates planned in the coming months so we wanted to share a bit more on what those are and why we’re working on them.
A picture’s worth a thousand words, and the images above tell the story of what we’re working towards. The first image is our current range of customization for your avatar body and face. What we heard from you - and found in our own testing - is that it’s hard to create a unique avatar identity. So much of who you are is tied to an accessory choice or a range of outfits, rather than the actual avatar. Take Gribbly for example; he’s known for his hat and glasses (and wonderful personality, of course), but without those accessories would look like a default egg. We’ve been missing a depth of complexity that lets you really be you.
The second image is our vision for how avatar customization should work. You should be able to build a level of nuance into your avatar face and body that allows you to be completely unique in Rec Room - if you want to be! Here’s some examples that we used internally to decide what kind of customization we would want, using some familiar faces.
Can’t see this one? I’ll include another example below
YOU are like papa (in the way that you’ll be able to customize yourself to look like anything you want)
We’ve just launched sliders to customize your body shapes released in Beta for Full Body Avatars on March 2nd and are releasing those sliders for the upgraded bean in our next update. You can read more about how those work in a new blog coming real soon (so keep your eyes peeled!).
Alongside the body sliders, we’re prototyping more expressive face customization features for extra expression: eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheek, and jaw shapes, and even testing out some makeup, freckles, and facial hair options. Here’s a sneak peek at what those look like in testing.
Since these features are beta, final looks may change a bit, but we’re working towards a vision where you can combine all these advanced customization options to create your unique look. The new technology that enables FBA and upgraded bean means we can introduce all these new features, but that also means we won’t be able to add these new customization options to the legacy bean. We’ll be back with more updates over the next few weeks, and real soon for the body customization sliders.
Our avatars have got a lot of love and attention over the last year and we’re excited to start rolling out the features for the future of you in Rec Room. Let us know what you think in the creator forum - your feedback helps us prioritize the most important changes, bug fixes, and improvements!
BUT they also do kind of look like the Xbox Original Avatars for the Xbox 360.
