#1826: 「Nel Blu」――宇宙探検と子供時代のノスタルジーを融合したインタラクティブ・ストーリー

The Voices of VR Podcast. his new adventure world called Nell Blue. And this is more of an inner journey. It's about going back to childhood and revisiting what it's like to have this kind of creative imagination, but also the whole boundaries between your mundane reality kind of get dissolved down and you get shot up into space. And so there's this kind of blending between the context of this space exploration with a kind of nostalgia of going home and these kind of childhood memories. And so the center of gravity of this piece is Earth Fire. So the Earth being that it is a story world that's in VRChat. It's a collaborative social game as well as you're going through this narrative.

But most of the kind of fire element is this kind of adventure and interactions. And I think for Fins, for any adventure he has, he wants to have this sense of exploration. So you are actually kind of exploring and user agency. But he's traditionally done a lot of, say, puzzle game aspects. And so a lot more air element where you have to kind of figure stuff out. This is more stage-gated interaction. But still, those interactions are very directly trying to have you embody different aspects of trying to really convey to you the story. So you actually go into work and you're kind of like checking email and kind of doing some repetitive tasks to really create this contrast in your body of being kind of bored, doing something that doesn't have much meaning. And you just feel like you're waiting for the end of the day. And then you end up leaving there and going back into this blast from the past and this kind of whole nostalgia trip. But each step of the way, you have, again, these different moments when you're interacting and participating. And because this is a social VR piece, there's also kind of a collective agency where you're kind of solving these puzzles together with other people as well. And typically, Fens has done a lot of these big, vast world explorations.

And this is a little bit more smaller and intimate exploration of kind of more of an inward exploration and inner adventure rather than outward adventure. So it's a little bit new and different for Fens. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Fins happened on Friday, September 4th, 2026 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hello, my name is Fins. I am a world creator, more specifically a 3D artist, a senior lighting artist and environment artist. And I usually make VRChat world and content on VRChat. Great. Maybe you can give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Yeah, so I started out as a traditional 2D artist. I do illustration. Eventually, I moved to concept art for movies and video games for a little while. That was a little bit in 3D with Unreal Engine, but not much came out of it until I started VRChat, where I kind of began my career in 3D, environment, art, and everything encompassing that.

So now I work at VRChat as a 3D artist as a full-time job. Nice, and maybe give me a bit of context for Nail Blue and what is the story and experience that you wanted to provide? So Nail Blue is a short experimental project I made for the Venice Immersive. It wasn't something I usually do in terms of the style. I have a very distinct style when it comes to the stuff that I do in VR shot. Usually it's like big adventure, epic story, epic adventure, grand environment and whatnot. But Nail Blue is more intimate, more narrower, more smaller. But yes, somehow I try to carry over the sense of vastness that sometimes I get to deliver to the players in my other projects. So yeah, it is quite experimental. I'm not super confident about it, but yeah. So it sounds like that, you know, you have a comfort zone that you're usually doing a certain type of experiences. But also, Venice Immersive has a very specific audience that I think is different than the VRChat audience.

And I feel like there's a certain way in which that VRChat people want really difficult puzzles and grand adventures. And I feel like for some people here at Venice, they have trouble locomoting through VRChat. And so I feel like there's a different demographic of people who are maybe wanting to see more cinematic content. And so just curious to hear a little bit about your experiences here at Venice Immersive in the past and how that may have informed what you wanted to do with this piece. So, yeah, this is my fourth selection here at Venice Immersive. Over the years, I've been kind of like giving Venice something that I happen to be making for VRChat. You know, initially, Treasure Heist, which was a puzzle narrative experience, which on paper is not very close to Nebula, it was completely different. And then eventually Complex 7 was an explorative narrative, and then Project Lost 4 was an epic adventure. But one thing in common that was made entirely for the VRChat audience,

and the pacing, the difficulty of the puzzle, all of that were made with VRChat players in mind, who are more youth, more veteran, they know the locomotion, they know how to find things. They are gamers. It's a second nature to them. But one other thing I learned over the years is that Venice audience is a very different kind of audience. Sometimes they never put on a headset in their life before. They don't know if locomotion where something that they would be comfortable with. A puzzle may be a little bit too challenging in some regard. So for Nail Blue, I tried to optimize that for the Venice audience. This is why when initially speaking with Michel and Liz, I told them that I made this for Venice, first and foremost. It's not something that I made for VHS player. VHS player comes after when the festival is done, but this is designed with the specification, the length, the comfort, the difficulty are aimed at accessibility and comfort. Yeah, in some ways you're using environmental design, you have a story.

I see it as a little bit of like an interactive narrative, but it's rooted in like really elaborate world building. And so there's like a world building that has interaction and that there's a story there with some, like I'd say, light puzzles in a way that you have to figure out some things or, you know, switch around. And so there's still a little bit of puzzling that is done, but much wider in the sense that it's a group puzzle. I happen to do it by myself, but there's like three people at the same time. And so like having three people working on the puzzle creates a little bit of a different dynamic. But just curious to hear a little bit about like when you're creating a piece like this, where do you begin? in terms of, obviously, you want to tell the story about childhood, and there's a bit of nostalgia, but there's also this hope and adventure, curiosity. So, yeah, I'm just curious to hear, you know, where did you begin? A concept with the story, I always think of, like, an environment first. I'm always a visual artist, and I try to draft a few different, I call them thumbnails.

Basically, I wear a rough draft with, like, an environment. but you can scribble them on, like, a paper or even on, like, Microsoft Pen, like anything. And I would make, like, five or six of them, and then I put them in a row, and I look at them, and the first frame of this environment will tell the story. And there's a few of them. There's, like, you know, a canyon and a rock. There's a forest. But there's a particular one overlooking of the New York City with, like, a telescope looking into the sky. And I feel some connection to this one, and I start to mentally develop the story from this one single thumbnail. And slowly it becomes a little bit of like that when you make a story, you build a lot of pieces of your own story and your own experience throughout life, woven into that story. You don't want to retell it to one-to-one, but you want to take a piece and part of that life experience and you put that into something that can be universally understood by many people.

So Nail Blue, that sense of looking up in the sky and wondering, was something that I'm always vividly remember. And that's something I wanted to achieve with Project Lost World initially. Project Lost World started with a kid also looking at the sky. But Project Lost World led to a fantastical journey in the future, a hypothetical future. that we hope could be one day possible, but Nail Blue takes place in a more grounded approach, where looking up to the sky doesn't mean, you know, like, you're going to go to space. Life is just a reality that you still have to face every day, which is something I have to attest with. Every day waking up, I'm a full-time caretaker for my parents. They're senior. I take care of them basically from A to Z, cooking, feeding, build groceries and all of that. And I feel of that yearning for remembering about the time where I still have time to think about or enjoying certain things.

And I'm not like constantly chasing the schedule, the appointment, the time, the work. And it kind of like went from there, from that picture. I was like, yeah, I kind of wish that I can just, like, sit on a hill and look at the star for a little while and just think about things instead of, like, all schedule, all appointment, all bills, all money. So, yeah, that's kind of, like, where the story is being able to start. It's a little self-insert, but I feel like it's something that universally a lot of people can relate to. Yeah, and you sort of start in this scene on the hill that you're looking up in the sky with the telescope that you can interact with and the phone rings, and it's sort of like you're waking up from a dream of sorts. And you're in your bedroom. You have to gather some stuff. You go to Subway and then you go to work and you have kind of like a full work shift of stuff that you're have to have an extended day. But you wanted to really give this sense of the repetition of the mundane world that you wanted to then go from the mundane into this more nostalgic, magical realism of the childhood,

but also mashed up into this space and sky. So just curious to hear a bit around once you had that first world, how you wanted to establish the mundane world and then contrast those mundane worlds into this kind of more magical world. Yeah, so the gray world is what I call it in a very little world sense. When you wake up, it was like all gray. And I wanted to contrast like the thing is in the beginning, you are presented with wonders, with that curiosity, with that freedom. In the hill, the hill serves as the anchor of the purpose of something where you had And the telescope, when you touch the telescope You have about 20 seconds or so Before you're interrupted by the phone Your joy, your freedom will be taken away from the dream From that momentary magic And then you have to face with reality in the waking hours so on goes the daily mundane life i try to keep it like as brief but as like also somewhat you know

like waking up that's annoying get your keys get your phone time to go you know transportation bus or tram whatever most people have to go to work with some sort of transportation you get to work and that dreaded walk you know like that walk to the office i think maybe even like for some kid You know, they have to walk to school and they're like down the hallway that you have to like... before you turn into there and that's the rest of your day. And I want the walk speed to like deliberately, you know, that dreaded feeling. And you come in and like, oh god, this is another day. And you sit down and you do the work And it very annoying very repetitive and it boring and it on purpose and I had to wrestle with this like design philosophy where I like I don want a player to get bored, I don't want them to feel bad about you know being in the experience but I want a little bit of that uncomfortableness in that like god I want this to be over already and where do you draw the line between that medium, that gray, where like uncomfortable but not

enough to want them to rage quick, you know, like the whole experience together, but enough to like make the point where the contrast between the work and whatever comes next is loud enough to be noticeable. That's why I was very deliberately with the color, like I made the shader specifically just mute out all the color possible, but then when the color appear, it's deliberate, like the rocket, you know, starting to like saturate on your desk the sign telling you where to go like all of that like it's very deliberately designed and then when you get to the attic like you wake the adding up and then you are flooded with colors of all spectrum it was the vibrant it was a saturation and that is intentional and i hope it's enough to make the point drive and now the contrast between the two or the gray world and you know the colorful world is like more than ever to tell at least half of the story. You do it through color. You do it through environment. You don't have to say too much to try to point.

Yeah, I know that you had also designed this for three people to go through at a time. And the first time I did it was with you. And so I remember sitting at the desk and you're basically like going through a stack of papers, you're clicking on, you're processing them, and then you have email that you're responding to, you're answering a phone. And that was going on and on and on. And I remember asking, it was like, is this a full work day? Are we almost done yet? so it's been eight hours yet so yeah i think that definitely got that point but then yeah as soon as you do finish you do see an object from your childhood either a letter or a star or a little paper airplane that adds additional color that then you grab and interact with and i guess that's a it's a bit of an affordance within vr games where you have things that are kind of light-baked in a way that you can tell that's part of the environment and stuff that's not that is more generally interactable and so not being able to interact with everything but only able to interact with things that you want people to interact with so yeah there's things that you know by those affordances to pick up and then you kind of then proceed walk out into your hallway of the work

and then kind of a magical attic door falls down from your work office but then when you go there you're transported back in time just what feels like a childhood home and with all this color and all these toys. Just curious to hear a bit around once you get to that childhood home, what all you wanted to include in this world that you end up spending the majority of the rest of the experience in here, in this room, in this space. So then it's kind of like in some sense a destination that you end up kind of returning to some previous locations. But for the most part, it's the last new big environment that we're going to be in, which is this attic home. Just curious to hear some of your design inspirations for what you were trying to go for in terms of what felt like maybe a childhood home? Right. So everybody has a different childhood. Not everyone is going to grow up in an American servant with an attic full of toys. I definitely didn't. I grew up from Vietnam. I would love to have that as a child. So when I made the attic, I was wondering, like, the attic has a great stage for all

the magic. It's not the most relatable setting. not everyone owns an attic like I say but the natural feeling of wanting to be in the you know like the kitchen belongs to the mom the living room maybe your dad occupies and you have your own room but your own room is in that gray world so how do I give this a very distinct space for your inner curiosity to come out and the attic to fill like this an almost reclusive space that you can like hide to and I feel like you don't have to own an attic in your life to be related to wanting to be in a space that is just for yourself. And even then, it's filled with things that might not be relatable to anybody. I feel like somebody might grow up. They may own any one of those items. And I was hoping that they could find something that relates to something that they used to have. As a kid, I would love to have an indoor tent, which is high inside. And I put that right there. And if people want to, they can just hide inside. there's a little fake kind of drawn window that in the world visualized out to be an actual windows

space the famicon the toys the plushie it's a playground it's a sandbox just like any kid will have a sandbox some stuff actually work together if you take some little block and you put on a train that would carry the block around some of them are meant to be interactive together or work together and does it feel like this is the most in the middle ground compromise from my the way to tell the story would end up relatability without actually, you know, like being too specific to some kind of region or country or that people grow up to. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about it because when I see it, there's a little bit of like, oh, this is a nostalgia. And I think there is a bit of a nostalgia. And I think actually in your piece you say it's not about that nostalgia. It's more about the curiosity and exploration. but there's also, as I hear you talk about it, a bit of wish fulfillment in terms of like, this is the type of stuff you wish you would have had. And so it seems like some of your world-building process is for you to be able to transport and reimagine

different aspects of your child parts of yourself to be able to have experiences that you didn't have the ability to have. Absolutely, yeah. The biggest point of me, I had a couple of interviews before this where people were asking, like why do you make this kind of world, why do you make Lost World, why do you make Treasure Haze and whatnot, or Complex 7. It's a place that I want to be in. It's a place where, as a kid, I wished desperately that I couldn't be part of. And in this way, the attic is the kind of childhood that I own some of this stuff in there, but I don't really have this entire thing in there. I feel like it serves two purposes. It can be nostalgic for some people, but it can also be like, well, you're an adult now, but here is a small momentarily way of putting yourself back as a child and experience that. If you were to have that, then what would you do? So yeah, that's kind of, I think it's pretty okay for that. Yeah, and there is a number of different aspects in which this world,

from the beginning, has this portal into another reality of sorts, It's like the tent you look in. It has this window that looks like kind of a Star Wars or an International Space Station observation deck type of thing where you look out and you actually see that you're out in space. And then there's another moment where you have to construct like a model of a rocket ship, but then there's like a real life-size rocket ship that takes out right outside your window, which if it was that close would probably burn your house down because it was like so close. and then ending you sort of have another way in which that you're taking away the roof and allowing the different contexts of space to kind of mash up together with this childhood home and i see that a lot with immersive art in terms of like meow wolf will be a lot about like you're in a kitchen you opened up the kitchen door now all of a sudden you're in a completely other new reality that you feel like you're walking through a portal into another reality and i feel like there's a bit of that Meow Wolf immersive art quality where you're in the context of a childhood home that has either

wish fulfillment or nostalgia elements with a lot of symbols of play and toys and curiosity exploration but then you have the stars which are very magnificent that are also mashing together so yeah just curious to hear some of your thoughts on different ways that you wanted to give a sense of magical realism to this world that is starting to create these portals into these other realms and other realities yeah um the gray world is like i try and make it mildly painfully more you know settled in realism so you have to wait for the trend you have to click through your stuff you have to like get to do the adult thing but like in the attic like it's not in And the design, you know, like when you look at a window, it's a vastness of space. You're not really anchored into anything. You kind of hear. And it's kind of like the design language is that a lot of things could be possible. Anything you touch can actually change.

Maybe the environment shifts around. You don't really expect this place to behave as if we're real. And it's not. It's not. That's why toward the end where the attic kind of like give away and then you float up. There's multiple stages of dreams, almost like dreamlike state that you wake up from. When you go back to the hills, for example, the phone would ask, are you ready to wake up? And that's disappointing. Some of the speculation I hear from the community so far, which is interesting, an interpretation that people say even the gray world, when you are going to the work, it's not really actually your, or haven't actually woke up yet. Because the feeling of the froze, the never-ending task, the voice in your head, and then the freezing light, you're not actually awake yet. You know, this whole surreal experience. I dream a lot. I do a lot of lucid dreaming, and it's very close to kind of the environment shifting logic that I used to experience when I do lucid dreaming,

where I can be in one environment, I'm like, oh, I want to be somewhere else, and there's something at the door to be somewhere else, and they give me permission to do that, and when I go there, I don't know what to expect, But it's a little bit of the design influencing dream logic in a way. That's interesting. Yeah. So what's the base reality here? Like what's truth? What's reality? Because you're right in the sense that when you go into the subway, no one's moving and they're all kind of still life. And so it's sort of like you're in a liminal transition space, but it's also got this kind of uncanniness where nothing you see is actually moving. So were you saying that people were speculating about that or is that saying that you are also alluding to that? I wanted people to kind of, it's fun to let people speculate. It's kind of like, if you tell the story too literal, it kind of gives everything away. But if you know, like one of the things in Dream is that you don't remember the face very much, and they're constantly shifting. And if you go back to the subway or the office and look at the faces, they're quite kind of like Dream. Some of them even more like blurb out, like completely.

They have a special shader on them, on the face specifically, where it makes it very difficult to tell all the details and stuff like that. And it's on purpose. On some level, it backfired a little bit because I got on Twitter, people were like, this is a horror world. People were actually scared when they go to the subway and people didn't have faces. They were like, uh-oh. People were like, okay, no, it's not a horror world, but it's playing onto that level of bit of line. It had two purposes. For the dreamlike kind of like speculation, it served that purpose. The other purpose is you don't really remember the face of people under your daily trances. You see people, but then it's kind of like gone. The moment you stop seeing them, everyone is faceless in a certain way. Even where we're sitting right now, we see all these people. But one day, I wouldn't remember it from a couple days from day on, at least for me. So I kind of like allow it to have that dull purpose of that. I don't know if people wouldn't pay attention too much to that, but I was hoping that they have their own way of seeing people. because for me dream character is very interesting your own brain like doing certain way of like

projecting and almost like rendering this being in this very space and they only have one purpose Almost like they are what do you call them extras in a movie Yeah, and this NPC kind of like, in a way, acting like that. They are not there to be part of your story. Unlike Lost World where you have Reggie, he's very memorable. He has a voice, he has a presence. He is there with you. But these NPCs are not there. Interesting. Okay. Well, new layers and levels that I didn't necessarily read the first time, but interesting to speculate and think about for sure. Well, it's interesting that you are a VRChat world builder who's building these amazing, fantastical adventures and experiences and really immaculate environmental design. And yet you have the ability to lucid dream, which I imagine you already have the ability to go into all sorts of these realms on your own that may be even higher fidelity. And so I'm just curious to hear a little bit more around that experience you have of lucid dreaming

and if there's a bit of trying to give other people that experience that you have in lucid dreaming, whereas I imagine that you were able to have something that may be even higher fidelity within the context of your own lucid dreams. Yeah, so I've been dreaming as long as I remember having my own self-awareness. I remember every single dream, every single day. without a bit. I would recall a dream 15 years ago, and I'll be able to remember that. I don't know why, and actually I thought it was normal enough to the point where I asked people about their dream, and they said, I don't dream. I'm like, what? It's like not breathing. To me, people not dreaming was so bizarre to me, and I found out that people, not everyone dreams, and ever since then, yeah, I'm a little more curious about dreaming. My first time experiencing lucid dreaming was when I was like five or six years old. And it was freaking me out. I'm like, wait, am I awake? Am I that? Like, what's going on? As a kid, you don't know what the heck is this dream. You just know that you are extremely awake, but you're not in a familiar environment.

So, ever since I grew up, I'm like, okay, okay, okay. So, your brain has this function where sometimes it's completely awake and able to render an environment that you're not quite awake yet. So, slowly enough, I harness that ability. It takes a lot of, like, quote-unquote training, because you get too excited, it tore you out immediately. You get too, like, curious. Sometimes it behaves a little weird. Dream is unpredictable. But with enough time and effort, you kind of know what to do to keep yourself, like, grounded in this lucid dream and keep it going on as long as possible. But anyway, not like going through how to lucid dream too much, but lucid dream eventually becomes, like, a secondary playground for me. When I go through some stressful time in life, involuntarily, it wouldn't put me in a place of, oh, well, that's cool, well, time to have some fun. I'll be in a fantastical, I don't know, epic adventure, I'll be fighting aliens, you know, taking down their mothership, and it will feel so real, it feels so real,

it's indescribably real. And I wake up and I'm like, damn, I kind of wish that lasted a little longer, you know. and ever since I hear about the anime store out online you know about like the brain VR thing and I've been thinking so much about it I'm like what if because to me dreaming is like another reality so thinking about the brain VR thing is like going to another reality so when Oculus thing was the thing I'm like I want to make an environment where you can be in kind of like the dream instead of like having to go to sleep having to do all of that I'm just put it on and I'm there, and I can be there as long as I like, anytime I like. And making VR travel is the ultimate form of that. I have literally a project called the Dream Project Diary, where for a week straight, I would record my dream, and I would spend about 30 minutes to an hour to recreate a scene from that dream I had that day. And it's public. You can actually go visit it. There are quite a couple of dreams in there. Yeah, I have an interview that I published a while ago around some Jungian analyst that was also working with some artists.

And someone was going into Tilt Brush and recreating their dream. And Jung had this idea of active imagination where you could just daydream. And it's kind of like meditating. And rather than having your thoughts go away, you almost feed into those thoughts and really let yourself get into this altered state of consciousness and have this shamanic journey into the dream realm. And so you mentioned that you can pretty much remember all your dreams. So does that mean you don't write down your dreams? You just remember them all? It would be too overwhelming to write down. I would never have enough paper or enough time to write them down. So I just keep them in my head. If I have to pull them out a certain day or time, with enough effort, I shouldn't be able to. It shouldn't be a problem. It's just very, really specific. I kind of lock my dream in my brain. It's a lot to remember. Obviously, if you remember every day, every dream that you ever had, like, it is a lot. But sometimes I do make sure that I remember the one that I, like, give me, like, extremely long impression.

You know, kind of like you have a lot of files, and there's a really important one, and there's a bunch of junk that doesn't, like, I don't care about dreaming about eating noodles in a street in Bangkok, like, whatever. Like, I don't want to, I don't need to remember that. I can pull it back out if I need to, but for me, the dream that, like, makes me question when I wake up, I'm like, okay. Sometimes it's, like, make me change decisions about my work or my day-to-day operation or even give me an idea or give me, like, how to optimize things. Like, it's almost like a training simulation. So, yeah, it's very specific. I enjoy dreaming. I wish that I got to keep doing this. I don't know what to do if I start not to remember my dream, to be honest with you. I'm kind of scared to think about. So when you're working on a project like Nell Blue, do you deliberately go into your dream realm to sort of explore design inspirations? I'm just curious if there's a part of your lucid dreaming that directly feeds into your world-building design process.

I didn't have to because Nell Blue, the environment, and that particular playground was already in a dream at some point already. It has always been there, I just had to recall it But working with Unity and placing out the environment I just started to pull some piece here and there And I did thought about, you know, like Maybe I need to visualize this a little bit better in a literal sense But I just didn't really have a chance So Unity did its own job And I was able to get enough starting point The attic actually went through like three or four different iterations the attic that Lisa Michelle initially and Mike saw was a completely different attic. And I went through it, I'm like, this doesn't really work. And then I demolished the entire thing and I started over. And now I'm like, okay, let's pull from, like, what did I dream about? Like a couple years ago, I dream about you having this bouncing bed that can, if I bounce on it, I can, like, jump all the way to the attic. And then you have that literally that same bed in Nail Blue,

where if you bounce hard enough, you will hit the ceiling. stuff like that where I start pulling bits and pieces same with how I do world building in assets, you know, I have a lot of assets and a lot of things that I used before and I will start to modularly put them together to be something cohesive same thing yeah, and so I'm curious if we could walk through a little of the interactions that you have within the attic because there is this interactive component to your stories, it's very environmental storytelling, but then you also have you know, in the past you've used narration but here you're getting little diegetic messages around work, and it's kind of like different moments and opportunities to kind of have ways that you're pushing the story forward. But I'm curious to hear how you're augmenting both the environmental design to tell the story, but also with either text or language or voiceover or with interactions, how you wanted to use all those other components to help tell the story. Yeah, energetic design is really important in this one

For the past work, there's markers, there's arrows There are UI texts that tell you what to do and whatnot But I didn't want that for Nail Blue Nail Blue is the environment should tell the story The lighting should tell the story And the voice, the voice is a little nudge It kind of pushes you forward and gives you that little hint but it's not there to insult your intellect it's not there to insult your intelligence i don't want to handhold people but i want there is enough of that like the flashlight one of the key items i think i feel like i don't know if it's just me but like whenever i had a flashlight the first thing i would do is just like shine it around endlessly with random stuff for no reason even if it's never like oh that's so cool let me describe it at the desk for no reason i feel like having a flashlight, the first thing, the instinct is to shine it and to see the spot and see how it behaves and how it shines against certain objects. So when you have the flashlight, the first thing you shine and you catch like a star and you're like,

oh, what is that? That little moment of, oh, what is that? Kind of carry a lot of the design philosophy in the attic. If you're curious enough and you reach out and you touch it, it might respond in some way. Same with before you get the battery for the flashlight, it didn't have any battery, so what do you do? As a kid, I only have enough money for, like, maybe a couple batteries, but right now, I ran out or I go and steal from the remote, and my mom will yell at me later. I feel like that's kind of semi-universal experience, so I put a bunch of toys around, but there's a very clearly blinking remote, and then you grab onto you, click on this. Battery dropped out of the remote, and now the remote is dead. You can't use it anymore. But hey, you have battery for the thing more important to you right now, which is the flashlight, stuff like that, you know, they all have a purpose together, like, a lot of the items, they don't walk solo, they walk together, and I feel that's important, diagegetically, and there's a gray area where, like, maybe it's not clear enough, and people

get frustrated, get stuck, like, I don't get it, you know, they turn on the flashlight, and they don't point it at anything, so they will never understand that they need to follow the star, so there's, like, that gray area that I'm still trying to figure out, and, yeah, it's try and error well it's you know I was thinking about it because there's a way in which you're telling a story around being a child and you want to have people explore be curious and so there's a bit of you need to embody that in order to progress the narrative because there are these interactions where you have to figure things out and so you're putting those interactions in a way that is trying to also reinforce the larger story that you're trying to tell right so if you're not curious it's gonna be hard for you to go to Nailblue. I'll say that for sure. We have people that came in and they wanted to reward and immediately they were like, I want to see the story, I want this puzzle to be go away so I can see what happened next. And that's just not gonna work. Like sometimes you just have to accept that some certain element or certain style of war is meant for everybody. And I mean that very literally when

it comes to Nailblue. If you're not interested in exploring, curious, then just don't play Nailblue. but I like to think most people want to and most people did want to experience that the people who don't want to is minority and I'm not to worry about it but if people are open-minded to it a little bit more than usual then you know maybe they not want to do too much narrative or puzzling but then they did one or two things that reward them would like you know pay off then they more incentivize to keep going like oh actually not too bad or that's kind of cool let me keep going And, you know, like, as a kid, it's kind of like the same thing. You play with random things, and you don't really know what you're finding. But then if something clicks or something scratches your brain a little bit you keep going and you got obsessed with that for a little while Yeah Yeah when I was thinking about the different elemental combinations of the pieces I was creating these elemental genres, categorizing all the pieces, and when I thought about Nell Blue, I thought, well, it's mostly starting from the world design,

so the environmental world building. And I was like, well, is it more the story? I was like, no, the story's not given to you. Is it more around the puzzles? and it's like, no, the point of it's not the puzzles. The point of it is to explore and to be engaged and to be curious. And so it felt like it was earth, fire, so a combination of environmental world building with some interaction and participation in order to get the story. So it's not necessarily a game, but it's more light participation to help augment the different aspects of the story that you're trying to tell. Basically, yeah. I'd have to tell a story because I feel like a lot of, quote-unquote, narrative experience. like they deliver everything to the player in a very literal sense. I feel like there shouldn't be a sense of like your action changes the environment. Your action has a cause and effect. And that should feel satisfying in some level. You feel like you're contributing. I don't want to sit there in a beautiful, playful environment and then I can't touch anything and then I just have to sit there and watch the attic become this

quote-unquote supposed magic that I didn't even play a part of. you know, toward the end when, you know like everything is a team effort, right? And you can do that yourself, but then, hey, I got a block here, I think that goes up there. Oh, this star, I think it's probably going up there, and then you have like two or three people like put together like this constellation. And toward the end, when you go back to the hill, there is actually that constellation in the sky, and then when you wake up from that, the first thing you look up in the ceiling is that extra sticky star that make the entire constellation. In the beginning, I don't know if anybody noticed, but there was a bunch of torn off, like start in the ceiling, and now it's completed. You completed it. It's your consolidation. This is the result of you and maybe your peers working toward making and changing this to be a satisfying and fulfilling result or ending. So that's what I was going for. Okay, yeah, I missed that. I have to go back and check. So in the beginning, you see on the ceiling in your bedroom, there's scratch-out stars.

And then in the attic, in this magic realism, nostalgia, kickback, you construct the Aquarius constellation. And then when you go back into the dream world, into your reality, then you can see that you had reconstructed aspects of your dream. So that's really cool. Well, I wanted to talk a bit about the ending because you are participating and your interactions are helping to kind of unlock this lifting of the veil from the roof. and you float up into the stars and you are able to have this transcendent experience of sorts where you're able to, again, go from one mundane reality and have this proto-adventure into the stars of sorts. And then, yeah, really nice kind of shaders around there to be able to give this sense of going beyond the bounds of the home into something that was floating up into the stars of sorts. So just curious to hear any of the thoughts that you were trying to go for with this culmination of a bit of a payoff of solving all the different puzzles that you needed to do in order to get to this culmination point? So that answer is lying to the title of the experience.

And as many people might realize, it's based off the part of Neblu, the famous Italian song. And the song was about, you know, you said blue and flying to the sky. And I won a little bit of homage because I had to decipher the title, the experience. I was wondering, like, what's the best way to converse this idea of wanting to be free, wanting to explore? I wanted to break free from that monotone, that grayness, that routine. And the word Nebulu and the lyric and the song was, like, the best representation of that feeling of wanting to fly out there. And I told, you know, some people are rather intimate, you know, like experience with my life where I feel trapped, I feel caged in my own duty. I feel like I can't spread my wing and just go to places where I want to be and do my things to be constantly surrounded by duty and life realities.

So Nail Blue, in a way, allowed me to express that feeling of that wanting to fly away, which is what you get to do. So toward the end when you like, the voice literally is like, go on, fly. And you propel yourself up and then you go toward the lights and this galaxy and you get to float there for a little while, play with zero gravity and whatnot. That's kind of like where it came from. The title, it has quite a little bit of influence to how the ending where it came off. Gotcha. Okay. That's good to know. So I wanted to ask about that you're normally designing these worlds for VRChat players, but this is the first time that you're designing a world for Venice, but you're also publicly available for people to play on VRChat now. So I'm just curious to hear what some of the feedback is from the VRChat community playing this more cinematic or narrative-driven piece that's a little bit different than what you're normally doing. So the light proposal difficulty are torn down for comfort for Venice.

I did have some interesting feedback where people thought it was either a little short or the puzzles were either too difficult for them or too easy. Right, some people just didn't understand, like, they tend to get stuck around stars, the package of stars. I had a test group where, oh, not really a test group, but my friend, where they went in, they got the star, and it didn't really connect to them that they had to put it on the poster. They just started literally throwing the star everywhere, and then they ran out of stars. And it couldn't progress. So I had to come back and reprogram the star to, like, you never run out of star. You can, like, ask as many as you like so you can, like, complete the constellation. Stuff like that that you never account for. You will be like, okay, if you have star, let's be very mindful about this and then put them on the step. Nope, I'm going to tour them as shuriken. And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. This is kind of like live and learn kind of thing about VR champion, you know, player behaviors, you know. For Venice audience, you have a tour guide. I don't think people would start throwing them around, but for VHS people, they love things to have their feedback.

I'm going to be a gremlin. I'm going to start making a mess, you know, like very, very different culture, different way of interacting. And this is why the feedback so far overwhelmingly all positive, I would say. I've been monitoring the media in the past couple of days. I posted zero thing about Neblu. I haven't said a single thing about Neblu up until this morning. and people were like, what is the thing from Prince out of the blue? Oh my God, I need to go. It's going to be private maybe in like 11 days at the festival. But so far, so good. A lot of very, very valuable insight of how people behave. And some of them were expected because one designed for another audience and then the other audience gets to play it. So some expectation of length and difficult where I foresee them a little bit. But helpful. Any feedback is helpful for me. It's never a useless feedback. Nice. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential for this type of world building

and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable? I just love able to tell a story without literally telling a story. I feel like there should be more experience that have a little bit of intimacy to it, a little bit of personality to it where you don't have to like make arrows and pointer and UI text say go here do this press this walk that I feel like immersive storytelling should respect the presence of the player as much of their time there you're in that world you're the guest your action matters your presence matter and here you are kind of like the guest to the hotel and we are the staff We will make sure that your stay are enjoyable. And we will tell you a story that feels fulfilling toward the end of your stay. Nice. And is there anything else left inside that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? Keep on creating. I saw some amazing stuff this year.

And some of the line-up for the best of the world is also amazing. I can't wait to check them out when I have more time. But, yeah, it's always kind of like both from a VHET staff perspective. and from just a fellow world creator peer perspective, the organicness that no amount of money can buy. You can put billions of dollars into a place and you wouldn't just get like crypto and grifters and stuff. But then you grow something, a tool, a place for people to express themselves organically and you get colored, you get diversity, you get story from all walks of life. experience that you would never thought about and it's something that I'm very honored and very happy to be a part of and I'm always looking forward to see what my fellow world creator is going to be doing and I feel like this is just the beginning honestly, I say this every time but every year

I just get more amazing, I don't know how people do it and I hope I be around long enough to keep seeing as much as I can yeah me too and dr maro's new world paprika vr was also being featured here and so i know you had a chance to connect with him a little bit more but yeah just a lot of really amazing creators on the platform and i had a great time actually going through each of the vr chat worlds and i'm going to be talking to mike salmon about them but yeah just a lot of advancement beyond just the existing genres that i've seen with world building and you know music worlds but you know actually more stories this year being featured in the context of the Worlds Gallery, which is really great to see more narrative components that are being integrated in. But yeah, it's a really great community, and I always love to go to Rain Dance to see some of the latest curation of different stuff, but also here at Venice Immersive to see how there's the gallery selection, but also pieces like yours and Jesse's, the really amazing piece of Back to the Experience, VRChat Worlds that are being featured in competition here at Venice Immersive.

So yeah, really great to see this culture of VRChat being featured at such a stage like Venice Immersive. And yeah, it was really great to be able to sit down with you and hear a little bit more about your story. And yeah, looking forward to seeing all of us here in the future. So thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. And every year, this is my trip to be able to talk with you and just like nerding out about it. So hopefully we'll be here next year and many years to come. Awesome. Thanks, Venice. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. and I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free, make it public accessible for not only you but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans, and if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So I really need your help to be able to get to that point.

So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. you