Doug North Cook is the CEO and Creative Director for Creature, which is both an immersive game studio and label announced a year ago that’s representing 10 different XR studios and 16 projects slated as far out as 2027. Creature had four different projects with announcements as a part of the UploadVR Summers Showcase 2024 on June 26th that included Laser Dance, Thrasher, Maestro as well as the “cozy sci-fi, psychedelic adventure” mixed reality game that they’re building called Starship Home.
Each of these games are exploring either innovative hand-tracking or mixed reality mechanics that are exploring new forms of embodied gameplay. He describes the ribbon dance-inspired gamed mechanic of Thrasher as “a form of extended proprioception” where it feels like an extension of your body when playing it. I totally agree with this assessment, and I elaborate more on the magical experience of Thrasher’s hand tracking with the creators after having a chance to have an early look at Raindance Immersive where it took home the best game experience. I also caught up with the solo developer of Laser Dance, which picked up one of the Spirit of Raindance 2024 Awards. North Cook said that Laser Dance has become his go-to demo in order to show off the affordances of mixed reality, and both of these games capture the innovative indie spirit that are represented by the game label side of Creature.
I had a chance to catch up with North Cook to unpack the challenges of mixed reality development, a bit of a behind-the-scenes sneak preview on their mixed reality game Starship Home, collaborating with SideQuestVR on a $1M Indie VR Fund, but also how he’s found a unique sweet spot between an agency and publisher to create a collaborative brain trust of veteran XR game developers who are helping to solve many of these intractable XR design problems.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're having a conversation with Doug Northcook, who is the CEO and creative director for Creature, which is both an immersive game studio as well as a label that is representing 10 different studios and 16 different projects that are going all the way out to 2027. And there's a couple of pieces that were actually being featured at Raindance Immersive where I had a chance to get an early look at Thrasher, which just released yesterday. Check out the interview I did with Mike and Brian about Thrasher. And then also LaserDance, which I also featured with Thomas VanBouw. So Thrasher ended up winning the best game experience at Raindance Immersive 2024 and LaserDance actually picked up a spirit of rain dance award and so the projects that creature are representing have got this kind of indie vibe that are exploring different innovative game mechanics either through hand tracking or mixed reality or just something that is new novel and different and so i had a chance to catch up with doug north cook to dive into a little bit deeper into their own flagship mixed reality game that they're developing it's called starship home which doug describes as a cozy sci-fi psychedelic adventure game kind of a new genre for what you do with mixed reality in terms of modulating and creating these digital imprints on your physical contexts. And we explore both the frontiers of where he wants to see the future of gaming go with XR and mixed reality, but also a little bit more about some of the other games that they're supporting like Maestro, which was announced the day before I had a chance to talk to him. So the Upload VR Summer Showcase was happening on June 26th, 2024, and I had a conversation with him the next day to unpack the four different projects that had new announcements that were being shown during that showcase. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Doug happened on Thursday, June 27th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:07.990] Doug North Cook: I am Doug Northcook, and I am the CEO and Creative Director at Creature, which is both a game studio focused right now on developing a new mixed reality game called Starship Home. And then we also run what we call a game label, where we support the release of other games. in VR, mixed reality, and also on non-XR platforms as well. And we now support 10 studios in total.
[00:02:41.325] Kent Bye: Wow. Okay. So maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:47.588] Doug North Cook: Sure. Yeah. So I had a friend who got the original Oculus developer kit from the Kickstarter. And when I saw it, I was immediately in awe of what was very clearly the possibility space that was about to open up. And so I basically stopped doing everything that I was doing at the time, started teaching myself everything that I could about how to build applications, started working on some prototypes, and that kind of led through a series of projects and collaborations that ended me up at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where I live, where I developed and ran an undergraduate program focused on immersive technology, which was really exciting, building what was really one of the first kind of dedicated programs focused on immersive design and development. I was there for about seven years working on projects with a lot of companies while I was there, working on projects with Meta, with Google, with the National Science Foundation, kind of all across the board from games to platform to research. And then my friend Callum Underwood, who was CEO of Robot Teddy, reached out to me and was like, it's time to come out of your tower and get back to work. And at first I was like, no, I'm pretty happy trying to make my way as an academic. But then he presented to me this idea of really kind of taking a lot of what they were doing at Robot Teddy around VR, which at the time was just beginning to co-develop Among Us VR with Intersloth and Shell Games, managing ongoing business development for Superhot, and then also They wanted to establish a fund specifically for VR games that they wanted me to manage and bring studios in with that. So I left academia to go and take over as head of VR at Robot Teddy. And while I was there, we had a pretty exciting run, which was releasing Among Us VR, helping to release The Last Clockwinder, No More Rainbows. and several other really great games. That was a really exciting time, and I think really gave me a taste of both what I was capable of doing, but also this incredible need in the industry for a type of support that wasn't a publisher. to really help studios level up what they were doing, to bring together the collective support of multiple teams to be able to refine games even further, to be able to bring games to multiple platforms, to find more funding for projects, to be able to increase scope, and to help developers find a way to maintain the majority of their revenue, which a lot of developers don't. And so when I left Robot Teddy, it was really originally just to start working on this new mixed reality game that I had pitched to Meta. And as soon as I had left Robot Teddy, multiple studios reached out to me. And they were like, hey, can we get some of the kind of support that you were providing to studios when you were at Robot Teddy? And that really is what kind of became Creature was built really out of necessity of what I was seeing in the industry and the type of support that I think a lot of my favorite studios and developers really would benefit from. And so that's kind of what ended us up here.
[00:06:36.565] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. That helps catch me up and I think catch everyone up into a little bit more of your journey. Can you elaborate a little bit more as like exactly what your job title was at Robot Teddy in terms of like all the different roles that you were doing?
[00:06:48.942] Doug North Cook: Yeah, so I was head of VR at Robot Teddy. And so in that, I was overseeing and managing all of our VR projects. But my big focus while I was there was building and scouting for signing and then mentoring studios that we funded through the VR fund that I built while I was there, which I think while I was there, we ended up putting funding into nine games. And a few of those released while I was still there. And then I was also managing some of our other partners as well and contributing work to Among Us VR. And so it was a lot. We were a very small team. And we were managing and working on some of the biggest titles, both in and out of VR, because we were working on not just the VR version of Among Us, but the non-VR version of Among Us as well, and Gang Beasts and Clone Drone and the Danger Zone, some other big non-VR games, which was great because I hadn't really spent a lot of time working on non-VR projects in my work. I've really been very, very deep in the XR space. And it was, I think, really valuable to be able to see more of the kind of general games industry that lives outside of the XR space, which is very, very insular and very specific. And so I was able to pick up a lot of knowledge and cut my teeth working on projects that we're launching on Nintendo Switch and on Steam and on Xbox and just getting to see the ins and outs of all of that, which I think has brought some really good value to a lot of the partners that we're working with now.
[00:08:28.979] Kent Bye: And is Robot Teddy, would you consider that to be a label that is distributing these games? Is that what they are considered? Or are they a production house? Or how do you describe them?
[00:08:38.090] Doug North Cook: Yeah. When I was there, we always talked about ourselves as self-publishing support companies. And so, you know, something that was kind of in between like a publisher and an agency, that was like the term that we had kind of landed on was self-publishing support. And when we started Creature, I think part of the intention was that we wanted to kind of slowly over time work to try to build a little bit more of a public-facing brand for Creature itself, but also to provide a more robust layer of support than I was able to provide at Robot Teddy, just because of how small our team was and the really constrained nature of a lot of our engagements.
[00:09:22.325] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, that helps set a lot of context. And there seems to be also a connection with the types of games that you're working on that most of the time, not all the times, but a lot of times they have this distinct focus on mixed reality. And so maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on with the new Quest 3 and we have the Apple Vision Pro, there's this reinvigorated interest in using some sort of camera input to situate you into your location, wherever you may be. Most of the time when people are playing VR, they're at home. And so how you can like start to transform elements of your home into gameplay elements and maybe just elaborate a little bit more about mixed reality and why that was so interesting to you to try to solve some of the problems that were presented by mixed reality, meaning that you don't have complete control over the context, but you want to start to kind of mix and mash and modulate the context of people in a way that you can explore through gaming that
[00:10:17.339] Doug North Cook: we are just starting to really dive into now yeah no for sure i think it was really when i i was on a trip and this idea just landed fully formed in my mind for what i felt like was a true mixed reality game concept which was an idea that i'd been really trying to like kick around for a few years because I had done some early prototypes while I was at the university on the HoloLens and on the Magic Leap and was able to kind of play around with some of the early AR headsets that were available and still exist now, but are basically still the same. And that idea was the game that we're building now, which is Starship Home. And I think what really excited me was the possibility of trying to basically do exactly what you just said, which is really try to solve some of these new design challenges and lay some of that groundwork, which I mean, immediately I was like, we have to try to pull together a team of people that can solve these kinds of problems. And so I reached out to Pretty much immediately before I even pitched the project, I reached out to some people that I thought could do that, that were able to come in and work with us. And so some of those initial people on the project were Patrick Hackett, who was one of the co-developers of Tilt Brush, Ashley Pinnock, who was the art director on Tilt Brush, Mark Schramm, who was the lead engineer on Superhot VR, and Gravity Lab, who's just this legendary, incredible engineer and designer. and Chris Haney, who was on the original Space Pirate Trainer team. And really just a little bit of a who's who of these are some of the people that helped to lay the foundation for what VR was in the early Vive days. And I was like, the only way we can crack mixed reality in the way that I wanted to try to approach it was to put together a team of people that I thought were really capable of doing that. And I think that idea really appealed to a lot of us of really just like, hey, what if we all worked together to try to do something, something genuinely new and something that felt fresh and fun and different? And so we've ended up making something that is, I would say, like it's a cozy, psychedelic sci fi adventure game. which is not just a kind of game that doesn't really exist in general, but also definitely doesn't exist in mixed reality. And I think I'm just like, I mean, I'm really like in awe of how far our team has been able to push what's possible on Quest 3, which, I mean, when we originally started working on the project, there were no Quest 3s. We started doing all of our early prototyping on the Quest Pro and on Quest 2 because there were so few Quest Pros to go around, which was incredibly constrained at the time. And then we pretty quickly realized that Quest 2 and Quest Pro were not a realistic candidate for the depth of mixed reality experience we wanted to develop. So we worked with Meta to kind of refine our direction and just go all in on Quest 3 and what's capable inside of the Presence platform, which is all of their core mixed reality tech. And yeah, and we'll be releasing it later this year. And similarly, when one of the first developers that we talked about joining our game label was Thomas van Baal, the creator of Cubism. And at the time when I talked with Thomas, he was just starting to go a little deeper in prototyping for his new game, Laser Dance, which It just felt like he was operating at the exact same time and in the exact same way that we were, which was we want to build a true mixed reality game, not a pass-through game, but something that genuinely understands the room that you're in and uses the room as a staging ground for the experience. It's not a backdrop. It is the experience. And I think that's what's so exciting about it is it's really about, you know, like I love VR and VR is amazing. It's so many things, right, that you can really like disappear and go somewhere else. But there is something so magical about playing something in whatever space you're in and being able to transform that. that space. And we've talked a lot in this past couple of years, working through a lot of this, about this idea of mixed reality as an assisted daydream, where really is we're giving you just enough where if you come along with us, you really can do something incredibly magical. And you can do it still in your home, or in your office, or wherever it is that you are. And especially in a lot of our recent play testing, we've had users reflect that back to us, that they feel like the room they are in is actually a spaceship. They are actually going and that our plants and the other things that we're putting into their space, that they really live alongside the other physical objects in their space. And in that way, I think unlike in VR games, you can build almost this like digital imprint on your physical space, where we have a lot of people reflect back like, oh, that's where the helm of the ship is. It's on that wall. And people are like, I feel like it's still there. There's a layer there and a type of memory that exists for those objects, which is fundamentally different from VR, because it's grounded in your space. And a lot of what we've tried to do is make objects that feel rich enough and responsive enough that they can feel like they belong in the space, which is an excruciating process to try to get to that level of detail and fidelity, especially when you're building on top of tech that is constantly kind of changing and shifting.
[00:16:25.066] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually had a chance to check out laser dance as a part of the rain dance being a juror for the games competition. And so I had a chance to try it out in my home and do an interview with Thomas. And, you know, one of the things he said was that, you know, in his home, he's got actually like a slanted ceiling that isn't necessarily always accounted for, but also he's got some stairs where it's like a big open gap on the floor. But how VR is interpreting that is that you know, kind of extends out the floor as if there was an actual floor there. And he said, he's had to not only work with meta, but also that creature, the label that he's working with you, that there's kind of like a brain trust of different people that are thinking about these same problems of like, okay, here are things that you know, you're trying to adapt to whatever rooms, shapes and sizes and all the different edge cases and that you have to find either design patterns to work around them from within the system or work directly more with meta to say, hey, you need to implement this or that feature in order to accommodate this spectrum of use cases and problems and obstacles that we're coming across. So it's almost like creating a collective of people that are all thinking about these problems. And so that seems to be a theme of not only your project that you're working with on Starship Home but also some of these other independent developers or projects that you have underneath your label that you kind of have this collaborative spirit of trying to really get at the root as some of these intractable problems and either solve them from you know meta side having them do stuff or to find either workarounds and strategies for how to dynamically approach this kind of design problem
[00:18:04.755] Doug North Cook: Yeah, for sure. We did an internal town hall recently with all of our partner studios where we were able to get everyone together and have everyone be able to share what they're currently working on, most of which are titles that have not been announced, some of which are studios that haven't even been announced. And I think for a lot of us, and it's true for us as well, for our internal studio is having other peers that you can have a structured and also legally confidential way, because everyone is covered under mutual NDAs that cover our entire label structure. And so it makes the handing off of information both safer, but also it's just genuinely collaborative. And in part is all of the studios that we've brought together are people that we also like, and we want to work with, and we want their experiences to live out in the world. I think we've been very, very selective in that way of really only bringing in studios that we think are making incredible products, but are also made by incredible people because we have to spend a lot of time together. And I just don't want to do business with people that I don't want to talk to. And we have the benefit of really, I think, having, I mean, to your point, like the brain trust of like a lot of people that are thinking really deeply about mixed reality, people who have been working in VR for a really long time. But then we also have a couple of studios that we're supporting now who have maybe been in games for for a really long time, but are building their first VR title. And so for them to be able to have some people that we're able to connect them with who can benefit from some of that experience of people on our team and other studios on the label who have put in the reps right, who are on their third or fourth released title. And, you know, there's a lot of like pitfalls there in terms of design and even engineering support, but also just like general business best practices. And, you know, when you're negotiating a contract, like what is even possible, right? Like most people have no idea because they've never been through it, or maybe they've only been through it once. And when you have the collective experience of like under the label now between already released upcoming and future titles, we have, I think, I think we're now at 16 individual titles and that's just a lot, right? And there's so many lessons learned there and a lot of A lot of value. And so, yeah, it's really been, I mean, it's been like a thrill for me just getting to work alongside so many people that I deeply respect and admire. It's also exhausting. And I'm very long overdue for a vacation and a nap. Yeah.
[00:20:52.486] Kent Bye: Well, today is Thursday, June 27th. And just yesterday, Wednesday, June 26th, there was a pretty significant launch day where Upload held their summer showcase where you had four different creature titles that were being featured from both the Starship Home, which we talked about a little bit, but also Laser Dance, which we mentioned, but also Thrasher, which I also had a chance to play through yesterday. both on the apple vision pro and the quest and yeah just a really amazing kind of gesture based type game from the creators of thumper but also maestro which is another kind of like you're a conductor of an orchestra and using that kind of gesture mechanism there kind of like a beat saber but instead of beat saber you're directing the orchestra and so those were four of the 16 that were just announced yesterday so yesterday seems like it was a pretty big day of not only announcing some new titles and maybe showing some new footage of a lot of the projects that you've been working on, at least a quarter of the different projects that you've been working on. So yeah, I just love to hear a little bit more around that big announcement day yesterday and what that was like.
[00:21:53.649] Doug North Cook: Yeah, that was a pretty wild day. Just like having, we have this really great like opening logo sequence that we have the composer for our game Starship Home wrote this kind of logo chime sound for us. He goes by Equip. He's like one of my favorite Vaporwave artists. And he made us this very kind of like Sega Genesis, like 90s inspired logo chime. And to have that like open the core part of the showcase was very fun for us. But yeah, I mean, it was a big day in a lot of ways. I feel like yesterday was the culmination of a lot of the last year and a half, which is really like showcasing this kind of big new mixed reality trailer for Starship Home and having pre-orders go live, having pre-orders for Maestro go live on the same day and wishlisting for Laser Dancer. It's like and announcing that, you know, we're putting Thrasher out on Steam before the end of the year. There's a lot all at once, but I think you picked up on the exact theme that kind of lives there, which is that, one, all four of these games are fully playable with hand tracking. And I would say treat hand tracking not as like a secondary consideration, but in some of those cases, like Maestro especially, hand tracking is the primary input device. And I think there's something really exciting about having titles that invite users into just a fundamentally different kind of experience on the device. And Maestro, in particular, with hands, to me, it's really the first game that I have ever played with hand tracking, where hand tracking is not just good, but it's great. And it is the core fantasy of the experience. MySQL also works with controllers, and it's good with controllers. But being a conductor, the fantasy of that is not holding controllers in your hands. It is gestural. It's expressive. And you really feel that when you're playing maestro. You really feel the music in a new way. And the way we've kind of like, this is mostly a joke, but I would say it rings very true to us, which is that we feel like maestro does for hands what Beat Saber did for controllers, that it has that same kind of raw physicality. but it's really about your gestures and that it's just kind of this perfect hand-tracking game. And we're super, yeah, that's one that I'm just so thrilled about. It's a game that I go back into very regularly, which really is true of all of these. It's like we sign games that we want to play. And like laser dance has become like my go to demo when I'm taking my headset around to a friend's house or to my family. Laser dance is the thing now because it's, I think, the best entry point, not just for VR or for like any of this, but like it's just it's the perfect introduction to headsets in general because it's It's so simple. It's so straightforward. And you immediately understand what your objective is. The feedback is really simple. And the person doesn't escape into a place where they're uncomfortable or disconcerted because they're no longer in the room. And I think especially like for mixed reality, but for headsets in general, I mean, the majority of people, the far majority of people in the world have never tried a headset still. And most of them, if they have, you know, they try to Google Cardboard like eight years ago or they maybe tried like a PC VR demo several years ago. Right. And something like LaserDance is this perfect either introduction or reintroduction. where you can pass the headset around at a party, and you're still there at the party when you're playing it. And then it becomes this really amazing centerpiece. And I think there's something really magical about that. But I think I am still not tired of playing any of these games that we're working on, including Starship Home, which at this point, I have played such an unbelievable number of times. especially in the last few months. But there's just something about the like playfulness that lives inside of mixed reality that I just love right now. But also that like achieving that level of playfulness is just like so, so difficult right now. So. And I think our team and also Thomas, I think, have stumbled upon something really special in this that I really hope a lot of other developers will see and take some inspiration from. Because I think there is something about mixed reality in particular here that opens up an entirely new type of user to come into the platform, people who are just not really that interested in VR because it feels almost like too gamery to them. And there's something about the accessibility of mixed reality. And also I think of things like Maestro and Thrasher that have really accessible input mechanisms, but have these really, really high skill ceilings, right? Which I would say is like the magic of Nintendo. That the Wii and the Switch have sold such an unbelievable number of copies because the input abstraction is so easy for people who aren't traditional gamers to just plug in and just be like, oh, I get it. I understand it. I don't have to learn what all of these buttons do. I don't have to use joysticks. I can just play. And I think that's a big thing for us is trying to make games and things that people can play with. Not things that they're trying to necessarily win or that they're trying to conquer, but it's like, we want to give people things to play with. And I think that's where new kinds of users are going to be attracted to the kind of content that we're trying to bring to the platforms.
[00:28:05.612] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of like Richie's plank as one of the paradigmatic examples that people would want to give someone a VR experience that, you know, you would put on a VR headset and be transported into basically a plank that's on the side of a building. And it's actually kind of call back to the pit demo that a lot of academic institutions, when they're giving demos to people, they put them into the situation where you are facing your mortality by being on a very high place. And I feel like the power of VR is able to convey that. And so Richie's Plank was an experience that people could say, hey, you know, you're in your home right now, but now all of a sudden you're going to be transported into this other place where there's part of your limbic brain that's going to be tricked into actually being there, this sense of place illusion and being transported to this other place. So I feel like LaserDance is one of those experiences that I agree with you that it's one of those experiences that people say, okay, here's what mixed reality could be when it comes to a game, which is you have your room, but now we're going to transform it into something else. And now we're going to have you use your body as a controller and you're going to move your body through space. And it's going to be fun because you're going to have to do it in a new and different way. And sometimes you'll catch a laser and you'll have to do it again. And so there's a, There's a way that it's really gamified, a mixed reality experience that, yeah, I think it's like one of those things that will be fun as a game to play, but also really great to show to other people to show the potential of the medium. And for me, when I was playing Thrasher, I also found that there's trade-offs between using the controllers on the Quest where you have a little bit more precision, a little bit more control, you have haptics, but yet there's a magic of using just my fingertips and my index finger to kind of twirl this thing around. Talking to Brian and Mike where they were talking about this metaphor of a ribbon dance where you have like this stick with a ribbon and you're kind of doing these different mechanics and they've really were inspired by this kind of abstraction of moving your hand, but then having some sort of unpredictability or an offset between it not being a one-to-one translation, but this distance that allows you to feel a lot more immersed into the games because there is this feeling where I felt like when I was using my hands, I felt much more viscerally connected to the game than when I was holding the controllers. And so just even between that as a game, you can play it with a controller or you can play it with your hands. And there's a different phenomenological experience between those and different trade-offs. a little less precise, a little bit more embodied. And it's this really interesting intersection where the games can be designed for these multiple modes of input, but yet people can kind of start to discover for themselves some of the magic of what it's like to start to use your, your hands as an input controller. And I can only imagine with the Maestro with, you know, having even more control with how your fingers are moving, that may be having little subtle nuances for how you're conducting the orchestra.
[00:30:54.827] Doug North Cook: Yeah, for sure. I think what Mike and Brian have stumbled upon in Rasher is it is one of the most subtle implementations of a type of input that I have been fascinated with for a very long time, which is like a form of extended proprioception where you start to use your body in a way to control something else. And in that way, like that other thing starts to feel like it's an extension of your body and you learn how to use it in really unique and new and clever ways. And you can almost build this intuitive, almost muscle memory kind of thing, where in Thrasher, as you're controlling the movement, you almost get this sensation of your hand extends into that space and is the actual entity. which is really surreal, and it's very subtly done, and it feels very simple in that way. But I think that their implementation is so refined and it's so elegant that it really does create that sensation. We have what I would say is the opposite end extreme of that in one of our dream sequences inside of Starship Home, where we give you these giant tentacle arms that extend out like several feet into space. And so you're going around and you're hitting objects and your arms are sliding off of the walls and your arms are these long, wiggly, floppy tentacles, which they're just so fun to play with because you start to feel the bounce and it almost feels like those are your arms and your arms are actually that long and you're able to kind of thwap them around at the surfaces, which is a very like extreme example of that kind of extended proprioception. But it's to me, what is like so fun about all of this is the ability to give someone that feeling of like, what if your arms were incredibly long and they were floppy like giant noodles Or what if you were able to like manipulate a giant space eagle at a distance with just the twist of a wrist and the flick of a finger? And that's to me like why all of this is so fun, right? Is that like you can have an idea like that and then you can build it and you can translate it to another person and be like, hey, let me describe this insane thing to you. Let me describe this phenomena to you and then let me put you inside of the phenomena and let you experience it for yourself. Right. Which we have very few ways of doing that as humans. And it's such a fun thing to be able to play with and to be able to share those ideas with each other.
[00:33:34.019] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know Jaron Lanier has been a co-author on a paper that coined the term of homuncular flexibility, where you're able to embody these different types of embodiments and that your brain has got this kind of neuroplastic capability. But also, you know, we've evolved from many other previous people. iterations from the evolution of humans. And so we're able to kind of slip back into these other modes of being. I think something like gorilla tag is probably a good example of returning to this primal sense of like, there's a part of that within us that would move around and swing around from trees and, you know, have this locomotion through the hands. So yeah, I think the types of stuff that you're experimenting with in Starship, I'm very much interested in checking it out and being able to dive much more into all these different types of experiments with proprioception, embodiment, and the way that it plays within the context of a game. I did want to take a step back and ask a question around this development fund that you did in collaboration with SideQuest back in August of 2023, where somewhere there was like a million dollars that came from somewhere and you did this collaboration and basically we're trying to inspire indie developers and vr developers xr developers to dive much more into like vr ar mixed reality gameplay maybe you could just give a bit more context for how that all came about yeah for sure so
[00:34:55.066] Doug North Cook: I've known the team at SideQuest, the founders, Shane and Orla. We've become friends. We've known each other for a few years. And they reached out to us last year. And they were basically like, we think what you're doing at Creature is great. And we have some money that we would love to allocate to investing into the developer ecosystem. And we were like, great. We have... the capacity to do something with this. And so we spent a couple of months working through what our goals were, what the strategy was, and then we opened up applications and submissions for this fund, which has been really an incredible response. We got almost 300 submissions to the fund, which is an unbelievable amount. And a huge shout out to Ed Lago, who helps run the core management of our game label. And Ed really spearheaded a lot of this initiative with SideQuest and just did a phenomenal job vetting a lot of the titles, going through every single submission. Every submission that had a build, we played through pretty much everything, Ed and I. And I mean, man, what a mountain to climb. And the first of the games that we invested in was Maestro, which we had already been working with the developers of Maestro. And it just became immediately clear to us that there was an opportunity to kind of double down and reinvest into what they were doing. And the SideQuest team was already very familiar with Maestro as well because their demo had gotten a lot of traction and had also gotten traction on and in the SideQuest community as well. And yeah, it's been a really incredible partnership. I think one of my perpetual goals again has been to try to find ways to help developers maintain majority control of their revenue. And SideQuest was incredibly aligned with that idea and that vision and so like the terms that we came to to all of these developers with that we put funding into i would say are like pretty radical in terms of like their structure in a way that like really leaves the developers in control and brings the full support of our game label so basically like all the titles that we funded we also signed to our label so they get the full support and they also get to benefit from that brain trust they get to benefit from all the other things that we do for everyone on the label. And so we funded three games through that. And we've now paused submissions while we take a step back and talk about what might be next now that we've spent down that initial fund. But yeah, it's been really great. And I really like, it's again, like another one of those things where it's like, with most of what we're doing is like, I just really hope that more people start doing the kinds of things that we're doing, like both in terms of like developing new kinds of games and really like pushing some of the limits, but also in looking for new ways of funding projects, because a lot of the traditional ways of funding projects, I think most people agreed and we've now seen are just unsustainable. And that's led to the kind of demise of a lot of studios. And you see this across the games industry right now. It's so incredibly volatile. And the industry has always been volatile. But I think especially now, more than ever, everyone is just like, OK, this has to look different. And so how can we do that? And so when SideQuest approached us, it was an immediate yes from us of just like, there's no one that makes as much sense to work with than the company that has just been at the forefront of providing support and structure to independent developers trying to make a way in a very complicated ecosystem. Yeah, it's been great. But also that our focus was not necessarily on mixed reality for that. It was really just in what are the best games that are coming to the platforms, right? So Maestro, not mixed reality, but is an incredibly innovative title, right? It's hand tracking, it's new, it's fresh. And I would say all the titles that we funded have some kind of like core unique innovation, but that doesn't necessarily leave it limited to mixed reality. And I'll be honest, like we had some mixed reality submissions and most of them felt too high risk to us. I think in part because we're so deep in that space right now of trying to build something that is mixed reality first. And it's just so hard. It's such a hard road. And it's also a very uncertain road economically. So if you're building only for mixed reality, your install base currently is limited to just Quest 3. And maybe Vision Pro, but building a cross-platform title, incredibly painful and out of the budget scope of most studios. And if you're just releasing on Quest 3, you have to capture such a huge fragment of that market to make it work. And for us, we think there's a long-term space there, and we want to flex into it. But I think when we were evaluating things from an investment perspective, it's like, OK, are we at that point where we feel like there's a critical mass here and also these developers are in the right place? If someone had came to us with something that was at the quality bar and innovation level of LaserDance, we probably would have funded them. And I think that's where it's just like, we just didn't see that, I think, with some of the MR submissions that we saw. I think most of them were either too small and were really more like demos or toys that we didn't think could evolve into a full game, or they were way too ambitious. And that's great. That level of ambition is great. But I think because we've been so deep in the development and we know the pitfalls, we're like, there's no way these people will ever finish this game. And really is like, they need four times the budget they're asking for because they don't know what the road ahead is actually going to look like. And they think the market is going to be way bigger than it's going to be, right? And so, so much of like, I feel like what my role has become is just being like, ruthlessly truthful with a lot of the people that we work with and just telling them like, you are incorrect in your assumptions, right? About the size of the market, about the quality of your product, whatever it is, you know? And in that way, like I have like become a person that a lot of people will send their friends to who they're like, I think my friend is in too deep on this project and I don't think it's going to go well. And they'll be like, well, you talk to them for an hour. And I kind of have a standing offer to most people that like, if you reach out to me, I will make the time to talk to you. That's becoming a lot harder because my time is a lot more full than it has been. But it really is like, I want everyone who wants to make something in this space to succeed. And it is very, very hard to succeed in this space because you have to be one of the best or incredibly lucky. And almost no one is lucky and almost no one is the best, right? And, you know, there are a handful of examples of titles that I would say, like, they're like incredibly small budget, but they have some kind of raw core innovation that just leads them to a massive success, which is like Gorilla Tag, right? Like Karastel, the creator of Gorilla Tag is... a savant, I think, in terms of the core innovation that lives inside of Guerrilla Tag and the embodiment and the social structure of that game. You can't replicate that, and you can't clone Karastel as much as people would love to try to do, I think. You know, so it was very hard to go through like almost 300 submissions and only choose three. But also the reality is of the 300, like even if we had more money, I don't think there were three more that we would have funded. Part of that is our filter is incredibly strict and our bar is incredibly high. One in 100 is about the number. One of those, Maestro did not submit to the fund. They were already part of our extended network. It's really hard to find great titles right now.
[00:43:17.059] Kent Bye: Well, yesterday you really made a big splash with the Upload VR Summer Showcase because you had a number of titles that I think a lot of people were really quite excited to see and may have been the introduction for Preacher for a lot of folks announcing a lot of these titles. And so I'm just curious in terms of like how you're coming on for a little over a year and a half and then working with 16 projects. Did you get like support from Meta to do Starship Home and production? Or is this all just being bootstrapped and hoping for the best as you launch things out in the world? Just... Curious to hear a little bit more around as you've been bootstrapping all that you're doing at creature, you know, how you've been able to accomplish that.
[00:43:54.178] Doug North Cook: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, yeah, so we've been really closely partnered with Meta on Starship Home, which has been really great. And so that's been a really great development partnership. But the game label really is like fully bootstrapped. And I would say only works because the core people working on the label have the insight, capacity, and... the skills to just like execute the work which is really like we we brought in ed lago who helps kind of run day-to-day operations on the label and ed was at cloudhead games previously as executive producer on pistol whip he's been in the games industry for 20 years he's been exclusively in vr for over 10 worked on like original like gear vr launch titles back in the day And so Ed is just able to bring this incredible amount of insight and experience and wisdom that just allows him to do work at a pace and at a level that most people just can't because they don't have that experience. And I think that's true across our production team as well. You just need people who can operate at that level. And if you do, then you can get an incredible amount of work done with a very small team. So core structure of the label is really me, Ed and my sister, Abby Cooper, who was vice president of product at a large medical software company. And I was like, what if you came and came in as COO at Creature and helped me like run the real business operations of the company? And she has just like been incredible. I think especially bringing someone in from outside of games and outside of XR, who is really a software product leader and a business leader, has been massively beneficial to us and to our ability to just execute on all of these projects. And I think with that is like there, especially when we first kind of kicked this off, we had a couple of companies and people kind of approached me and were like, hey, like, are you going to raise money? Are you looking for investments? And the answer was no. I would say I've like gone back and forth a lot on this over the last year and a half. And it's still a question because like more money would make a lot of the things that we're doing easier. But I think at the end of the day, like a lot of the studios that we work with, they trust us in part because of like our accrued trust. But also they trust us because there is no hidden agenda. There is there is no like. other incentive we're not trying to satisfy some venture capital investment that is hoping for a thousand x return right like the only the only drive of what we're doing is it's what we want to do and what we want to do is we want to make great games we want to help people run sustainable businesses and we want to try to like have a good time And, you know, like a lot of the games that we're pushing out and developing, like I would say, like they're very uncertain. They're somewhat high risk, but they're really exciting to us. Right. And if we had an investor that was like, we want you to try to like 100x our money or we want you to try to boost revenue for this year or we want you to start taking more revenue from your studio partners, which is what they would want to see, then we just become a publisher. We just become a traditional games publisher that is backed by investors and is trying to like, the goal, right, of any corporation is to extract the maximum amount of value. And we like money. Money is great because money enables us to do more things. But I think more than anything is like, I value our independence and our ability to to speak really truthfully and clearly and to operate in like a very transparent and open way with our partners where we can talk really freely about what's going on and we can be incredibly generous. And I think that's where like, what I want to do is like, I want to be generous. I want to be thoughtful and I want to help people make their best work possible. And if that means that like at some point, like our model for doing this isn't sustainable, that's fine. Because what I would rather do is like I would rather like go down doing that than like sell the like value and the magic that the people that we're working with are making to the highest bidder. Right. Doesn't mean that we won't like take some money from someone at some point. because that might be a good idea. But it would really have to be a perfectly values-aligned investor who's interested in the same things that we're interested in, which is trying to nudge the XR industry into a positive space that is about play and about wonder and about magic and isn't about extracting as many hours from users as possible and just monetizing users. into the ground which i understand like the necessity of doing that but i think at the core is like we want to try to make things that are worth making and worth consuming
[00:49:12.438] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think from being able to check out both Thrasher and LaserDance through being a juror at Raindance, it's given me an opportunity to have a first-person embodied experience of some of these games. And I'm really quite excited to see how they end up getting launched and doing out to the broader industry, but also all the other projects that you have cooking up, because it sounds like you've got quite a slate of different projects. And for each of them, they're pushing forward different innovations in a way that's really quite exciting to see mixed reality and also the hand tracking new input modalities and really trying to extend out the affordances of what the medium is and what it can do. So yeah, any comment in terms of what's next for you in terms of I know sometimes Meta has this weird thing where sometimes they'll spring up on me like, oh yeah, now I can finally talk about this thing is launching next week. But then their release schedule is very kind of under lock and key and there's a lot of secrecy. But is there anything that you can announce or describe as to what's next for you and any of your projects?
[00:50:14.827] Doug North Cook: Yeah, I mean, what I can say, I mean, what we're doing now is we're making plans for what our internal production team is going to start working on once we release Starship Home later this year. But also that we have games on the label scheduled out into 2027 now. So we are taking the long view here. And we're really trying to work on titles and work with studios very early in development. And so we have games scheduled this year, next year, the following year, and the following year already. And so that's really like, what's next for us is more. Like, we want to keep doing more. We want to keep trying to kind of push the boundaries and find ways to bring more developers in to keep working on all of this. And that's really like, that's it, is like what's next is just more of this, which is like trying to find titles that we think demand to be released and released in the right way and seeing if there's a way that we can step in and help make that happen. And with a lot of like the majority of developers that I talk to, you know, like I'll talk to them sometimes multiple times. And the answer is like, we're not the right fit. And I just give them some really kind advice, maybe help them negotiate some contract that they're working on or, you know, give them some feedback on something that they're working on. But for most people, right, it's not the right fit. But that's most of what's next for us. I also know you talked with Regine Gilbert not too long ago. And Regine and I have been working on a book together, which I started working on when I was still at the university. And we're about to finish, which is an immersive design theory book that we've been writing for Oxford University Press. And that is now done. And we're just back and forth on some final edits. And that will probably come out like early next year. So a lot of things, a lot of things coming over the next year. Like we'll be announcing more games in the next year. And we will also be releasing multiple games before the end of this year. But we don't have anything that's unannounced that we're releasing this year, at least not yet. But that could always change. But yeah, lots of exciting new game announcements. We'll have some really exciting updates too from some of our other label studios. I mean, some of our partners are working on some really amazing updates to already released games because we have a lot of games that are already out on the label as well that we've been supporting, which is really great. Always looking for exciting things coming out from them we just shipped some really exciting updates in the last several months into the light brigade from funktronic labs and they're probably working on some more as well but i'll let them share that soon but but yeah i mean that's like and i think the other big thing of what's next is like we're really hoping to be able to bring a lot of what we're working on to more devices. And I think I'm very hopeful that we'll see some more companies that will start jumping in to this space now that Apple and Meta are really proving out that there is a space here now. And I think that's exciting for us because we have this incredible library now of what I think are some of the best in class titles, games that are just like, beloved by the people that play them. And by the end of this year, we'll have even more of those, which I think, you know, if you're a new company working on a headset or a platform or a device and you're looking for an amazing library of content, you know where to find us.
[00:53:50.168] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of VR, AR, mixed reality, XR might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:54:01.775] Doug North Cook: Hmm. ultimate potential, I think for me, I think it really is a profound form of play. And I think that's really like what I've become the most interested in. and we've really tried to cultivate internally is looking for new genuine and positive ways of letting people play with things. I think especially with, I think Starship Home is really like built from that idea of making something that feel that we hope like, brings a youthfulness, an awe, a sense of wonder into people's lives in a way that is kind of like a sledgehammer. I think the ultimate potential here is to be able to impart really powerful ideas and experiences to people in ways that I think, especially as people get older, it can be very hard to crack that shell. and invite people into a state of play. Because I think most people, once they get into the workforce and they experience the troubles of life, it is very easy to lose a sense of playfulness. And I think it's one of the most important things to try to retain as a person is a sense of play and a sense of joy. And I think that's, at least for us, there are so many potentials of use cases for the technology. But for us, it's really about cultivating a really beautiful sense of play.
[00:55:41.134] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:55:46.580] Doug North Cook: Pre-order Starship Home and Maestro today. Other than that, that's it. We're just really excited about everything we have coming out. And if you're working on something that you think belongs alongside everything that's in our library, then come and find me and we should talk.
[00:56:07.270] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Doug, thanks so much for joining me today to help give the latest chapter of your journey into this XR space. I know we've had some conversations over the years, and it's really exciting to see you coming out of the ivory tower, as it were, and getting boots on the ground and starting to build some of these experiences and help to use your network that you've cultivated in the industry to have this kind of brain trust of people that are really trying to not only solve some of these really hard problems, but also push the medium forward. And from what I've seen so far, you've already started to do that and very much looking forward to being able to keep track of where creature goes in the future and to track each of these 16 and more projects that you have cooking up and be keeping my eye on as you announce more of these titles and yeah, be sure to dive in and as they get released and yeah, just see how the rest of the industry is reacting to them as well. Cause it's, I'm imagining this kind of like I know I like stuff, you know what you like, but as you put stuff out in the world, you never know how it's going to be received by the existing market. So fingers crossed, I guess, as you kind of move into these next phases. But big day yesterday announcing a lot of stuff and very excited to see where it goes here in the future.
[00:57:13.407] Doug North Cook: Thanks, Kent. Always a pleasure.
[00:57:16.368] Kent Bye: So that was Doug Northcook. He's the CEO and creative director of Creature, which is both a game studio that's working on Starship Home that's coming out later this year, as well as a game label that's supporting 10 different studios and 16 different projects that are going all the way out to 2027. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, So we're really diving into a lot of the more business sides of what it takes to have a sustainable indie VR development studio these days. And also this kind of unique arrangement where there's these brain trust of 10 different studios being able to share what they're working on and to get support, but also to push forward different innovations with XR as a medium. A lot of focus on hand tracking with each of the different four pieces that had an update at the Upload VR Summer Showcase from LaserDance, Thrasher, Starship Home, and Maestro. Each of them are using hand tracking in a different way, specifically like Thrasher and Maestro, really diving deep into new forms of gameplay that are driven by hand tracking. Also some mixed reality components in both LaserDance and Starship Home as well. And so they're really looking to make great games, to run sustainable businesses, and to just have a good time. And this real focus on play, you know, creating things that people want to play with and look at how the affordances of these mixed reality is allowing them to explore new dimensions of play. So he describes the Starship Home, the mixed reality project that they're working on coming out later this year, as a cozy sci-fi psychedelic adventure game. where he kind of thinks of mixed reality as an assistive daydream in order to transform and remix your physical context with a digital imprint. And so that's kind of the vibe that they're going for with some of these new genres that are going to be enabled by mixed reality. Also, there's this line between a publisher, which is trying to extract as much resources as possible, versus a consultancy where you're hiring them on to provide different services like self-publishing support. So there's somewhere between this agency and publisher and just trying to create this collaborative environment where they're able to enable people to push forward what's possible with the medium and to help support all the other business needs, everything from business support, production consulting, and the release strategy for the games. It seems like there was a lot of inspiration that was coming from Robot Teddy, which was founded by Callum Underwood, who was a developer relations at Oculus back in the day, went on and created his consultancy, and then Doug Northquick was there to head up the VR for a while. They had a fund where they were supporting different projects, and then Doug Northquick collaborated with SideQuest in order to fund these three different projects as a part of their indie VR developer fund, which sounds like from Maestro that they've continued to work with them. So they said they're working on 16 different projects all the way up to 2027 and to 10 different game studios. There's been a number of those game studios that have been announced in terms of Puddle Studio with Thrasher, Doublejack with Maestro, Creature is obviously working on Starship Home, Davos Van Bals working on both Cubism and Laser Dance, Funkotropic Labs with The Light Brigade and Fuji, and then the Neat Corporation with Budget Cuts Ultimate and Garden of the Sea. So a little bit of a sneak preview. And there's obviously a number of games that haven't been announced with what they're working on. At least four out of the 16 have been announced. And then some of the game studios haven't even been announced. And so very curious to keep an eye on what they're doing there at Creature because they're very much aligned with some folks that have really been helping to push forward what's possible with the medium, these different industry veterans that they're working with. And so, yeah, just very curious to see what they have coming up, especially having a chance to see Thrasher and LaserDance. I have a lot of confidence that whatever they're working on is going to have some sort of key innovation or something that's interesting and intriguing enough to push the medium forward. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
