An insightful interview with the Animal Company team

Tony: Hello Tera, hello Felipe. Let’s start with the introductions! Tell us who you are and what you’re doing now.

Tera: My name is Tera Nguyen, and I am a producer with marketing experience. I’ve been working in the VR and XR industry for the past 10 years. I started out as an architect, working in commercial architecture for about five years, and then I saw the Google Cardboard, and the Oculus headset came out. I was just so amazed to be able to bring whatever I could design in real life into the virtual world, and even go crazier with the virtual world, because there’s no brick-and-mortar limitations.

I went to school for virtual reality design, studying under Jesse Schell, and then continued to work for Schell Games on the I Expect You to Die title and a couple of other projects. I’ve learned a lot about virtual reality design work as a producer at this time, just because I love collaborating with different groups of people and bringing them together. Then, after that, I saw Spatial working on very innovative use cases to bring AR, VR, XR technologies, and game technologies to facilitate virtual meetings online.
I thought that was really, really cool, so I joined the team.

I went on this whole journey of trying to find product-market fit for the company, working alongside designers, engineers, and marketers. We came full circle after four years, from virtual meeting online for enterprise all the way to galleries and events for artists, and then social gaming online on VR, AR, but also we brought, too, mobile web.
Then, eventually, we came back to the initial roots, which is game technology for VR, and Animal Company is one of the products that came out of the whole experimentation process. I’m super happy to work with the team so far, to arrive at the success of Animal Company and be here today, and talk to you guys about it.

Tony: That’s an exciting journey. Felipe, what about you?

Felipe: I’ve been involved in video games since I was in high school. I started messing around with modding of FIFA games and then Quake games, and then got into Unreal games and just tried to learn how games work on the art side and how I could modify textures or modify a top 10 result list on a really old Tetris game just to beat my sister. My brothers and I just decided to get involved in video game modifications. Then afterwards, I started studying programming, left programming, and entered art and animation, just because I really, really wanted to focus on the art side of things.

I really enjoyed making textures and 3D characters, and just making them alive. Then I started working in several different companies back in my country of origin, which is Costa Rica, worked there for a number of years, and then moved to Canada. I saw this really cool company called Spatial that was experimenting with VR games and VR experiences. I started working as a contractor there, and then there was an opportunity for a new game called Animal Company that was in the making.
I was asked if I could collaborate on doing some artsy stuff, and I started making some art concepts for characters and how the look and feel of the game would be, and then started developing this vision alongside our super creative producer, Tera, and our creative leads, just to make sure that we’re aligning the path. Then we started releasing updates for Animal Company. It’s now been a year, and it’s been fantastic.

Tony: That’s amazing. I love your stories. We all mentioned a lot “Animal Company”. Maybe someone watching this video doesn’t know what it is, yet. Maybe they lived in a cave for the last year, I don’t know. Tera, do you want to say a few words about what the game is?

Tera: Yes. Animal Company is essentially a virtual playground, we call it a social sandbox, but also a spooky social chaos gameplay. It’s basically bringing a group of friends together and going on adventures where you fight monsters and you bring back loot in order to level up. The core gameplay is very simple. Everyone can play, but the fun of it is the people that you play together with, in order to complete the goal.

Our game is designed to focus specifically on Gen Alpha and Gen Z, just because we’ve played through a lot of VR games on the Meta Quest store, and we realized that the audience, Gen Alpha and Gen Z, are so engaged with titles like Gorilla Tags, Among Us, Yeeps. That’s why we were like, “Should we try to do a game that focuses on this audience specifically?” At the time, Lethal Company and Content Warning on Steam were very popular. We were like, “What if we bring these sorts of games on Steam over to VR and combine with the gorilla movement that we love so much and this audience loves so much?” That’s how we arrived at Animal Company.

We’ve been in development for a full year now. Last week, we celebrated our one-year birthday party with the community. Our Discord has 300,000 subscribers at this point. They all love the game and the community.

Tony: Happy birthday!

Felipe: Thanks.

Tony: Invite me to eat the cake next year… [laughs]

Tera: I had to jump into the game’s so many different servers to sing happy birthday with the players, and they had birthday cakes and sticky bombs everywhere, which was super, super fun.

Tony: In one year, you managed to get to impressive numbers. Can you maybe mention a few of them?

Tera: Over the past year, we’ve had over a million active users in the game. We grew really, really fast. Our daily active user peak was about 500,000 daily active users. Our retention is super high as well, I would say. Of course, it varies based on cohorts, but the highest we’ve seen is around 60% on day one, 30% on day seven, and then about 12% on day 30. Of course, that varies depending on the release. We’re in the LiveOps game, so we ship a new release every month, but we also have incremental small updates weekly so that we can keep bringing people back into the game to engage with the content that we roll out.

We grow organically. So far, we haven’t spent on marketing at all. The game itself is designed to create these really fun moments to make videos with. If you watch the videos on TikTok or YouTube, you want to experience it with your friends, and that’s how you jump into the VR experience to play and also to create videos. We’re able to create this viral loop where communities just create videos of their gameplay, and that’s how they’re able to find other people to come into the game.
We’re also doing that ourselves. We have our own YouTube and TikTok accounts, and we post videos of us playing the game every single week to find new players that way.

Tony: That’s impressive. I imagined that you made a huge marketing campaign, but you’re telling me that, actually, you’re mostly organic. You managed to make a game that is shareable and memeable, and this is the reason for its success. Is this correct?

Tera: Yes. When we start the game, we want to test with the community really quickly. That’s why, as soon as our team builds a prototype, within four to six weeks, we create our videos immediately, because we want to post them on TikTok and YouTube, see if any players find us, and think that the game is exciting. We realized that the players did find us through social media, and they were able to join Discord that way. They start making videos similar to how we make videos.

That’s how we feel: “Okay, there is something here that we can continue to build upon.” Felipe, for example, and then a lot of the leads from the team, we always play the game every single week as we roll out updates. It’s a good way to test your game update, but it’s also a good way to make videos. We combine all of that and are able to grow organically. The community follows us. They see what we’re doing, they also test the update, and then they make videos.

Tony: Nice. I want to ask both of you, because I guess you have different points of view about this, but apart from the shareability of the game, what do you think are the design decisions that made the game so successful?

Felipe: First of all, I think just the general design of the experience that we did, just from the get-go, was centered around, “Let’s create a moment where people can share and laugh… or freak out.” [laughter]
That was the core of the idea of the game. Even with the first prototypes… I remember Tera going on an adventure with a map, followed by four different people. While she was reading the map, she fell into a pit hole and the map was lost, and the whole adventure was destroyed. It was a really, really funny moment. Once that video was out, we knew, “Okay, we’ve got something really special on our hands.” We decided to focus on that: “Okay, how can we make experiences that are fun, are chaotic, and that are reproducible as well?“

Tera: Felipe got it spot on: something fun, shareable, but also super chaotic because, if you think about videos on social media, a lot of the things we watch are either to learn something or because the social dynamics of a group just make it really good entertainment content. If you think about it that way, then the whole game itself is designed like that. You bring a group of friends together, and you give them a very dangerous adventure that they could go on.
Then from there, they can either collaborate with each other to fight the monsters and bring loot back, or they will have to troll each other somehow, because that’s what people do. It’s like the classic variety of reality TV shows. That’s why every single thing the team designs, it is always thinking about… how do people interact with each other, and what is their common goal and common enemy to fight towards?
Then how are these moments perceived on videos so that Gen Alpha and Gen Z, who go to school or go to work together, they’ll be like, “Oh my God, these moments are so hilarious. Let’s jump into VR to experience it. Then we can make videos to share with friends or to be a content creator if we want to.”? I feel like a lot of these, we thought through since the beginning, before we start the prototyping.

Then we just test with the community from this whole LiveOps release, where every week we ship something, we ask the community what they think. Then we see if the community actually makes videos about them and whether those videos are actually shareable or engaging. Then we brainstorm again, think about, “Okay, what’s the next update?” and continue to build upon it. Then also there’s the art aesthetic where I think Felipe hit it on… what’s it called? The hammer on the nail thing, [laughs] where we thought through, “Okay, what is a good visual aesthetic here that Gen Alpha really loves?”
If you think about that, then it’s like, “Okay, a lot of the edgy color contrast combination… how are the faces perceived, how are the different body parts coming together?” I think, Felipe, you have the formula for success here that you can definitely share, but I know you baked it into every character that you design.

Felipe: Oh, thank you.

Tony: Felipe, then share with us some insights about how you designed this art style and the characters, et cetera, to appeal to this audience of the game!

Felipe: We’ve got to remember the first prototypes were really low-res textures and low-res assets. They started making headway on where we should go. We made some reference gathering and a little bit of concept art just to imagine how this world would look. Then we started thinking also about technical limitations and our objective to always try to hit 70 FPS. Since I have a lot of experience doing modifications with old games, and there are a lot of people on the team who are also specialized in optimizing stuff, we could probably just go into a really low-res look and aesthetic.

Then, for character design, the first character that we actually prototyped was made by a teammate of ours called Wonky. He made a really cool gorilla model. It had two main features. One, it opened his mouth whenever you were speaking, which was fantastic, and his eyes popped out when he was screaming. The other was a couple of buttocks that would just jiggle and bounce everywhere. That was really the core of the character design, to be honest. After that, we started going, “Okay, how can we make this better?”

I improved upon the original gorilla, and then we started designing characters that would have two arms, no legs, and be really low-res. Then we started just shooting out what animals we should launch first. I think our first release was frog, right?

Tera: Yes, Sigma Frog.

Tera: We definitely started thinking about what the tech constraints were for the Quest headsets, low resolution, all that. Also, if you look at what gen alphas play, they play a lot of Roblox games. Maybe there is a combination here where we can do very simple characters but have this meme aspect to it. It has some edge to it. Unconventional. That means maybe the expressions are the key, and it ties really well with the game design, which is fighting monsters, because you get scared, you get spooked.

The expressions on the face are really funny to watch in videos. Then the jiggly butt thing that we have on the character, if you think about how the environment is going into dark caves, tunnels, where you go with your friends… again, the social aspect is huge, then you see your friend’s behind. That’s why the jiggling butt’s really funny to watch. Then I think a lot of the color combinations also work really well. We chose really vibrant colors just because we think that they look good on videos, but also when we test with the community, they resonate well with those color combinations and the scale of body parts and all that.
There are a lot of trials. We didn’t know everything in the beginning. We start with tech constraints and some of the game design. Then from there, we just test with the community and with social media.

Felipe: I also want to add, now that you mentioned that, that one of the interesting things that happens when we added jiggly butts is that it allows for comedic relief when there’s a scary moment. Even if you’re in the scariest of environments in an adventure, you always see that. It’s a grounding in reality, not to take the game too seriously.

Tony: That’s funny. You mentioned a lot about making something for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I’m a millennial guy, and every time I think about the strong presence of very young people on Quest, I’m like, “I’m a bit too old to realize what they like, maybe.” I want to ask you about how your team works on that. I guess not all people in the team are very young people… especially not Gen Alpha, because they would be too young to work. How do you make a game for a different type of people than you are?

Tera: That’s a great, great question. I would say the majority of us are millennials. We do have a couple of Gen Zs in our team, and they really understand what Gen Z and Gen Alpha are interested in. I think a good game design practice is that if you are not the audience, then you have to be able to put yourself in the audience’s shoes. That’s why when we shipped the first prototype early on, we built a community immediately, and we just hang out on Discord and social media a lot just to hear what they comment. Then we do surveys with them, and we ask them what they want.
If you’re actively tuning into what the communities are saying, then you would know what they’re looking for and what they find funny. Of course, data analytics also help because that kind of data validates the behavior in the game. Where do they hang out on the maps? What do they purchase? What do they embody? How often do they come back to the game? At what time? That kind of data also validates what the community is saying. Then from there, you can design the experience.

We also play a lot of VR games. In the beginning, we played through Yeeps, Guerrilla Tag, and we also played premium titles like Ghost of Tabor. Of course, my previous background is in premium titles: I Expect You to Die is for adults. We have an understanding of what makes good VR games. I think our devs play a lot of Steam, PC, Roblox, and Fortnite too. We bring a lot of that experience and passion for what’s good in those platforms, bring it back into VR, and see what works.

Tony: That seems like a solid strategy. I will probably steal it from you one day [laughs]. Now, let me take a step back for a moment and ask about the past. You mentioned Spatial… and I remember very well about Spatial.io because back in the days, I was contacted by Jacob for an article on my blog. A great guy, by the way [like Jake, another amazing previous employee of Spatial]. He showed me the enterprise platform, and I liked it. It was great. Then, COVID arrived, and Spatial became something more like an NFT showcase platform.
At a certain point, I saw, “Oh, we’re making a game,” and I was like, “Wow, it’s a bit of a roller coaster.” Every time you managed to make great products, because that’s what I think, sincerely, but also you pivoted a lot until you found your very successful application. Do you want to tell me something about this story? Because it’s very fascinating, I think, starting from enterprise, going to NFT, and ending with a consumer game.

Tera: I guess I can start, and then Felipe can also add in because we joined at different times, so we had different journeys within the company. The entire Spatial team has always been very interested in XR technology. We started with building for the HoloLens, bringing people together on the HoloLens, whether that was a meeting or just a gathering. Then it started taking off during COVID because people bought the Quest headset, and the Quest 2 was very affordable. I think it was like $300 max.
A lot of companies start to embody it. We’re like, “Okay, let’s port it to VR and see how it works.” A lot of the leaders came from Google. We were able to bring in what works really well on the 2D interface into XR technology. That was one of the big reasons why I thought it was super interesting, because I came from a gaming background, and the game interface is very different from the sophisticated Apple/Google type of interface. I was like, “Wow, this company is going to be the one that’s able to bring XR technology to the masses.”

I joined the company. We had really big enterprise customers during COVID time, but we also had an influx of users coming in during COVID, who were artists, community builders, who just wanted a place to meet with their fans and their audience. We decided, “Let’s expand our platform to not just support enterprise, but also support smaller groups of creatives.” We went into B2C and expanded to add these gallery tools, virtual meeting tools. Then the community started to ask for interactivity because they don’t want to just do voice chat or webcam. They wanted to have mini-games to play with.
This was a very common pattern during COVID because you got tired of Zoom. We built our own Unity SDK to support people who could build interactivity into these virtual meetings and gallery experiences. We followed the whole journey, just really listened to the community every single week with all the weekly updates that we roll out. Then, eventually, we were thinking, “Ah, what if we do our own games, because that’s the only way to understand what it takes to build a game, so that we could build the tools to support games?”
How many games did we try, Felipe? 24 different games?

Felipe: Something like that.

Tera: So many games that we built on our own using our own toolkit. At that time, we also had desktop, web, and mobile components to it because not everyone had a VR or AR headset. Now let’s bring them into the web and mobile and build games on it. Then, Animal Company, at the end of it, is the last experiment on games that we had. It happened to take off really quickly. Now we split the team. Half of the team is on Animal Company. The other half is still building Spatial for big customers like Walmart, who want to build games on the platform that works on web and mobile, and maybe eventually in VR too, who knows?
We split the team, and we’re able to work together that way in the company. I love it because there are so many different aspects of creativity and technology that you can get involved in, and we all learn from each other.

Tony: Does Spatial still exist? I thought at a certain point that the project was shut down to just make the game. Instead, you are telling me that the Spatial.io meeting platform is still up and running…

Tera: Yes. Spatial.io is still up and running. We have a team actively working on it for big customers like Walmart, who want to build games on the platform on desktop and mobile. Then we also have Korea Tech, which wants to do virtual classrooms for their universities in Korea. Then we have Pirelli, who do car exhibitions or wheel exhibitions on the platform. Still, both teams are active.

Tony: Oh, that’s cool. I’m very happy because I liked the platform. Anyway, we just talked about how Animal Company started. It started as an experiment. It’s a bit funny because it’s a VERY successful experiment. Let’s come to the present day. You just launched an update, if I remember well. What is it, and how is it going? I’m very curious about the reception of people to this new gaming mode.

Felipe: Actually, we’ve launched a lot of updates since the release. As Tera said, we launch a big update every month and then just some small updates in the middle of the month. It’s been great. The latest update is the Critical Error update. It’s really chaotic. It’s our first update that goes into a more lore/cinematic orientation at the start. That blows the minds of players who have been going through the game for a long time now. For this update, our team on the environment side and the game design side has been focusing on making a new lobby for the game, which looks fantastic. Also, access to different areas that are either new or old, but a little bit of work has been done on them.
They created a really nice loop around the game on just going to the end of the adventure and then somehow coming back to the lobby that just ties perfectly. We’re super excited about it. There are a couple of new monsters as well. I think they’re probably the scariest that we’ve ever designed, and kids love them. We’re super, super stoked about it. I think the community has received it very well.

Before that, we had the Arena Update, which was also a really big one. It introduced a completely new game mode focused on PvP. It’s just so fun to go inside and have battles with other nine players or eight players or however many you may be. That’s been our most recent journey. Currently, we’re working on another big update that… we can’t say.

Tera: [laughs] I don’t know if you have played the game at all, but it’s essentially an adventure-type game. You go with your friends, fight monsters, and bring loot back. In May, which is when you reached out to me, Antony, we introduced a new game mode, which is PvP. Now this is when, after you gather loot in an adventure, you can go into the arena to battle with each other.
The reason why we do this mode is because we saw a lot of the players, after they play the main adventure mode, they gather in a lobby, like what Felipe said, and they start organizing their own PvP session, just because they have the items and the loot. Now they set up traps, they organize a war session.

We’re like, “This is interesting. Let’s introduce an official mode.” That mode is still in beta now, because we just want to see how people engage with it, but so far, the community really loves having this option where they form the teams and then they go into battle.
The gameplay is very similar to Minecraft, Bed Wars. That was our inspiration. We brought that into VR. Now, after that Arena Update, we want to continue building the adventure mode because we want people to continue playing, and going to different types of nature, and then gather loot. We did the Critical Update this past month. Crazy monsters. We just got a new animator who makes the monsters even scarier than it was before. The players respond super, super well with it. Then we do the story, which is also the first test.
We do this cinematic story. Players also respond really well. I think in the future, we’re going to continue to do more of these cinematic adventure modes. Then there is something new, which I think we can say it, Felipe, because the community already knows it. They love the leak.

Tony: Tell me something. Leak something!

Tera: Crafting is coming up.

Tony: Oh, wow.

Tera: Yes, because, after you go on adventure, you bring in resources back, the loot, and then you have all these items and weapons, so we thought maybe we let people craft their own weapons and that’s how they go back to arena mode in the future because now you have cooler weapons to fight in the arena mode. We plan as we go. We don’t really plan six months ahead because we want to be very responsive to the community. We take a lot of inspiration from MMOs on different platforms and bring that over to VR.

We can’t really promise in advance whether this feature we’re going to ship on a certain day is because we want to make sure that crafting feels really good in VR. That is something new that we have to innovate, because I don’t think we have seen a lot of other VR games doing this type of MMO gameplay before, especially with the gorilla movement. We want to be able to make it feel really good in VR before we promise a ship date. Crafting is going to be on the horizon. Then, potentially more Quest systems so that people keep coming back for new quests.

Tony: That sounds exciting. On paper, at least, it seems very cool. You will make your test, but I’m pretty sure the community will like it because it sounds very, very fun. Thanks for the leak. It will just stay between us three and all the viewers and readers. Don’t worry about that. [laughs]

Tera: It’s totally fine. I think giving some leaks is okay as long as the people are hyped. It just pressures us to deliver.

Tony: That’s pretty cool. Then I want to ask you a question because I’m always fascinated, personally, about mixed reality, passthrough, camera access, et cetera. Since Spatial and then in Animal Company, we can say the common thread of your work is making people socialize in VR, basically for enterprise or just for fun. What about socializing in mixed reality? Because in one way, it’s weird because we are distant, but we see each other in the same physical place, but everyone has a different passthrough vision. Have you ever thought about this or not? I’m curious to hear your insights about that.

Tera: Felipe, do you think our game will work in mixed reality?

Felipe: That’s a good question. Maybe. I’m not exactly sure how, but it could. We could brainstorm a couple of things.

Tera: Yes. Because our experience has always been in the XR space, we could definitely find some sort of mechanics that could be really interesting to experiment with mixed reality headsets. You can bring your character to your table. You can interact with it a little bit. You can talk to the other characters somewhere else, but then I don’t know if it will be as engaging as in VR because the whole experience is about going on an adventure, and I don’t know how to build out monsters inside your bedroom. [Laughs]
Maybe they come like Jumanji, the way you play it.

Tony: I would love that!

Tera: They come from your wall. I don’t know. If Meta innovates on the headset technology, I’m sure we’ll be able to figure out something. That’s why it’s important to give the technology to game developers, because we can really experiment and innovate, and create content experiences for this technology. I don’t know. I’m excited for it. There’s also the possibility of not using controllers because I know that’s something that Meta is thinking about… with the whole armband thing that they’ve been researching.
But the lack of tactile is hard, it is challenging. How do you grab things and feel that it’s real? Humans are so tactile. I think those are experimental projects that we could try eventually, but I don’t know if we can promise it will be as engaging as the current game right now.

Tony: Yes, it makes sense. By the way, as a millennial guy, if you make the Jumanji experience, let me know because I would love that, honestly.

Tera: I love Jumanji movies!

Tony: Seems amazing and fun, I would immediately wishlist it! Talking back about VR, we are in a very weird moment because we have some successful games like yours, but there is also a bit of fear from VR developers because now there is a lot of attention towards smart glasses and mixed reality. It’s not clear what direction Meta, but also the other companies, are taking. What’s your take on this?

Felipe: Seriously, I don’t know. I’m hopeful that they will continue the development of the Quest series. I guess the Xbox Quest is also a nice thing to see. I honestly think that I don’t know where they’re going, but it would be really cool if some gaming platform started adopting VR devices as opposed to just a Meta thing. Being Xbox, one of the first ones, I can totally envision other platforms doing the same things. Hopefully that’s the case. Just wishful thinking, I guess. We just carry on doing what we do best on the Quest device right now.

Tera: What I feel is that VR, so far, is such a good gaming console. I think Meta knows this. They have so many partnerships with Xbox, for example, but also with VR indie developers. They also have Horizon Worlds going on. I think the more we have people building for the platform, the easier it is to see that there’s potential in the market. I could tell you what we’ve seen so far with Animal Company. Gen Alpha adopts this technology like it’s a way for them to meet friends after school.

We see it so clearly because our game is always full of teens playing with their friends, and they make videos about it and post them on YouTube and TikTok. To them, it’s just like, “Hey, this is how I meet my friends.” It’s the VR games and Discord. It is how they build their community and hang out with people. To us, we’re very optimistic that Gen Alpha is maybe going to be the first generation that adopts this. It’s our Nintendo Switch back in the day for millennials. Maybe they will be the ones innovating what VR, AR, or MR, whatever we want to call this technology, for work.
Maybe they will be the ones continuing what Spatial has been doing the past 10 years, and innovating the space. Because they have already adopted the technology to play games with friends, maybe as they grow up and as the headset gets lighter and cheaper, they will be adopting it for work. We’re very optimistic about it. We’ve been in the space for as long as I joined, even longer than that right before I joined.

Hopefully, with Apple, Google, now also doing their own XR headsets, we will have more people building for this kind of experiences. It’s okay, it’s a different use case. The Ray-Ban is very light. You can capture videos as you go hiking. That’s a phenomenal use case.
I could see myself adopting that. You can also create content and go live-stream with your glasses. I think that’s a completely different use case. But VR for us, right now, is still very much gaming. For Gen Alpha, gaming is enough, because they go to school and they play games.

Tony: When you said that your players, when they grow up, will use the enterprise thing, I understood basically that with Animal Company, you are growing your future customers [laughs]. You are attracting them with the game, and you bring them into Spatial later [laughs]

Tera: One day, you will see the meeting room of Spatial inside Animal Company. You will see Gen Alpha unlocking it for their classrooms [laughs].

Tony: You put some subliminal messages. I think that’s a winning strategy… [laughs] Anyway, these are great insights. I have just a couple of final questions. The first is, you managed to make a successful VR game, and you already gave a lot of insights on how you built it. What about someone who wants to open a VR indie game studio today? What suggestion do you want to give to these people?

Felipe: I think if they do a social game, keep it simple. Try to test as early as possible. Build small prototypes and every week try… What we have accomplished as a team is to create a new build every week that we can all test. That’s just fantastic to do. I hope more small indie development studios start doing the same thing. I think it’s great. And also remember to involve the community in that process. They get super excited whenever there’s a build out and they give fantastic feedback. I would say if you start a new studio using that process, you’re off to a good start.

Tera: I would say if you’re interested in the XR space, start playing these games and understand what the community is saying about them. Why do these people want to spend time using this technology? Because I think at the end of the day, similar to Spatial’s vision, we always want to bring people together using new technology. Think through why people are using this technology and for what, and then design for them. Of course, like Felipe said, bring the people on the journey with you because that’s the only way that you can find product-market fit.

I do see a trend where VR developers are very young these days. You have a lot of people who play Roblox growing up. The whole idea of playing games goes alongside with creating games… Minecraft, Roblox… I see this in VR as well. A lot of Gen Alpha are now building games. They don’t just play Animal Company or Guerrilla Tag or Yeeps. They’re also trying to build their own copy of these games. Start as soon as you can and just start building.

Tony: This is great. Do you have a fun story about your time at Spatial or Animal Company to share with the readers?

Tera: When I started at Spatial, the whole idea of meeting people using these technologies was super exciting to me because we were trying to create the impossible, like how to use technology and feel like someone is there with you. Through the whole journey of finding product-market fit for Spatial, I loved this idea of like, “Oh, now the creators are inside the space and hang out with their audience.” I saw the exact same thing happening with Animal Company because our team played the game with the community basically every single week.
We’re the creators at this time, and we get to hang out with the community. I keep thinking about this like this deja-vu experience where the whole idea, mission, and passion are still the same. The technology is also the same, although it’s just expanding. Then the human aspect of it is also the same. It’s just a different audience at this point. I think that was funny, but also validating. That’s for me. Not a very funny story, but you get that [laughs]