👋 Welcome to our AMA write up with @Peter who generously agreed to spend an hour with us answering questions about Metanaut's open roles and more! Peter, thank you for being here and sharing your insights with the Work With Indies community!
🌝 Peter: Hit me with your hardest questions. My body & mind is ready! 💪🧠💪
🌝 Peter: Hi everyone! I'm Peter Kao, CEO & Creative Director at Metanaut (website / twitter).
I co-founded our VR studio in 2015 and we've been developing VR/AR games ever since (6+ years now)! We're a small award-winning team focused on creating friendly, well-designed experiences that we hope brings joy and positivity to the world.
When I'm not wearing my VR headset, I like to scuba dive. I'm a certified rescue diver with over 250 dives under my belt. In my past life, I was also a digital nomad. Living off of my 65-liter backpack + laptop, I traveled the world for 3 years while working on my start-up (a different company than Metanaut). Nowadays, I like chilling with my cat and garden!
Metanaut - Explore the Metaverse - A Virtual Reality Studio
🌚 Hi Peter! Thanks for being with us today. Love how VR mechanics were used in Gadgeteer. Does your studio work with VR narrative designers, and if so, how do you integrate them into your workflow? - Helen
🌝 Peter: We've had several conversations with different VR narrative designers for our Rube Goldberg machine game, Gadgeteer, and our next project, WONDER.
For Gadgeteer, we wanted there to be a story element to the puzzle campaign but ended up scratching out the idea unfortunately due to time constraints. We hope our next project will have more narrative elements to it though.
🌚 Glad you could be here! I was CPO of a Virtual Reality company in my previous years, and I've now taken up teaching. I'm just wondering what your favorite VR headset is and what you see as the 'main' one that will be used in floor shows / conferences and company meetings to demonstrate products? - PuffPirate
🌝 Peter: My favorite headset would have to be the Quest 1/2. It pushed the boundaries of VR tech and made it much more accessible for everyone. Oculus Link, Airlink, inside-out tracking, ergonomic controllers with great grip buttons, light hardware are my favorite features about it.
I think it's definitely the way to go if you want to showcase something on the road/company meetings.
🌚 Not VR specific, but do you have any advice in terms of first steps or general tips for someone trying to take the plunge from a totally different industry (nonprofit/higher ed. fundraising in my case)? Thanks! - Semner
🌝 Peter: I'm a part-time instructor at the Vancouver Film School teaching VR/AR design so I get that question a lot!
It really depends on what area of development you want to focus on. Design-wise, my unconventional advice is to study Industrial Design. 3D objects in VR have signifiers & affordances that are similar to objects in the real world. Because VR is so new, we're all still trying to figure it out so why not look at areas of knowledge that have been around for 100+ years for inspiration!
🌚 Related question, advice, and tips for someone interested in jumping from traditional games' development to VR development? Thanks 🤝 - ImMatureTony
🌝 Peter: Quest is taking up a huge market share and so it's important for anybody wanting to remain or get into the industry to pay attention to it. The Quest is a mobile device and so it's not going to be nearly as powerful as a PC. My advice is to look at mobile games development and focus on using Unity as a way to jump into the VR industry because optimization is really important in VR!
[.c-insight]💡 Editor's Note: Great insight here from Peter, who is deeply entrenched in VR, on the influence of Quest and its mobile-friendly tech specs on your choices for a game engine and overall hardware accessibility.[.c-insight]
🌚 Would you speak on your thoughts on Unity's VR support? Clearly, you used the engine to great effect for Gadgeteer, but do you have any gripes or things you know now that are specific to Unity that you wish you knew from the start? - Ido
🌝 Peter: Nice try CEO of Unity. Nice try.
But seriously, Unity is a fantastic game engine. We have direct lines of communication with developers inside of Unity but they simply can't answer everyone's questions. The great thing about Unity is that there's a massive community online willing to help each other though!
In terms of gripes about the game engine, I think it's that certain versions of Unity, pipelines, libraries don't work well with certain VR devices. Luckily, the VR industry (including Unity) is working on making it easier for VR developers but we're still not there yet. It partially has to do with the fact that VR hardware is moving so quickly too so I really can't fault Unity here.
I hope my answer pleases you, CEO of Unity. Please check your PM for my payment details.
🌚 What would you say were the keys to your own success? - Stevez
🌝 Peter: [.c-highlight]I see success like winning the lottery. To win the lottery, you must purchase lottery tickets[.c-highlight], and even if you purchased hundreds of thousands of tickets, it doesn't mean you'll win someday if you don't have the luck. [.c-highlight]Success is kind of like that. You can increase your chances of winning if you work hard, remain persistent, and focus on improving yourself. But at the end of the day, you still need to be lucky to be successful.[.c-highlight]
🌚 How would you describe Metanaut's company culture? - Nate
🌝 Peter: I think we're a friendly and creative bunch! I don't know how this happened but the majority of our team are dungeon masters (Dungeons & Dragons) who are morning people.
As you can imagine with a team filled with DMs, we have some pretty fun moments even during mission-critical meetings. 😆
We also work pretty hard and strive for excellence in everything we do. [.c-highlight]One of my challenges at the company is to actually make sure people don't work overtime. I think a good work-life balance is important in any creative endeavor and ultimately we're in the creative industry![.c-highlight]
[.c-insight]💡 Editor's Note: I love this. I am that person that chases people out of the office at the end of the day and on sunny Friday afternoons, then hounds them when they haven't taken enough or recent vacations. As a manager or leader, if you don't take the steps to set the expectation and model the behavior that taking time off is not only ok but necessary, then people tend to default to overworking themselves.
Peter understands this and actively encourages their people to prioritize balance as it is both good for the employee, as well as their creativity, and ultimately, their business.
Also, a team full of DMs sounds endlessly entertaining. 😄[.c-insight]
🌚 I have a question!! With Metanaut's primary focus on VR, how do you see that medium evolve in the future? - Katherine
🌝 Peter: I see VR as more of a primitive portal technology than another screen in front of people's faces. Yes, we don't transport you physically somewhere else but we do transport people's minds (so to speak). With VR, you feel like you're somewhere else.
I think the medium will evolve from having content that is good on screens to content that are more like destinations. Destinations that are not from this world but destinations that are more similar to our (day)dreams, a place where anything can happen and where our imagination can run wild.
🌚 When developing VR projects a lot of the 3D work can be in downloading/modifying existing 3D models, so a lot of the times creativity is in modification rather than creation. Would you say more of your tasks in the 3D field are in the modification of pre-created assets/setup/design or are most of your projects centered around creating 3D models from the ground up? - PuffPirate
🌝 Peter: We create models from the ground up unless they're quick prototypes.
Depending on what your project is and who it's for, using pre-made assets could be fine too!
[.c-highlight]We have the budget to pay artists for custom work so we do that. 🙂[.c-highlight]
[.c-insight]💡 Editor's Note: 👏👏👏[.c-insight]
🌚 Hi Peter, do you think full-body tracking has a bigger space within VR games? Only certain headsets seem to support this without difficult configurations. Do you think this will affect individuals with full immersion in games in the future? Or do you feel this is not an issue at all? Thanks! :) - Tawny
🌝 Peter: Finding ways to be more immersed in VR will always be something that's valuable. However, I personally don't see a future where the majority of people will be willing to put on a full-body tracking suit or similar. That's not to say there won't be anybody interested. We call these people "extreme users" in the design world and by definition, they won't make up the majority of VR users, IMO.
One place where full-body tracking suits will dominate though are places that need mocap and arcades.
🌚 If there was a portfolio that was too good to ignore, what would that look like for you? - Stevez
🌝 Peter: Great question. A great portfolio to us would be one that includes professional VR development experience, screenshots/videos of relevant work they've done [.c-highlight]with clear descriptions about what exactly they worked on in those assets.[.c-highlight]
For some reason, people don't talk about this but you really should explain what you're showing on your portfolios! Tell us what role you played, what tools you used, what are some learnings/failings when you did the work.
[.c-insight]💡 Editor's Note: This is so very important. And it doesn't need to be all that complicated. A short few sentences or bullet points will do.
As you can see from Peter's response, very few people provide any description at all. Which gives us an easy way to stand out among a sea of applicants.[.c-insight]
🌚 I "wonder" what you can tell us about Wonder? Could you tell us a bit more about the project we'd be working on if we were to join the team? - Nate
🌝 Peter: WONDER is a really exciting project for us! It will be an ever-growing collection of vastly different VR experiences. It's going to be our playground to explore fun & innovative VR mechanics and game loops that simply cannot exist anywhere else.
Since each of these experiences is going to be relatively short (10~15 mins), we're able to take risks and push the envelope since we're not committing years of development to the idea. VR is moving towards more and more polished experiences which is great but the caveat is that we're going to see a slowdown in novel VR interactions/mechanics. WONDER will fill that gap by regularly releasing concepts that people have never seen before!
We're starting to release some of our prototypes now, so feel free to try them out by joining our Discord.
🌚 Do you and your team have any favorite tools to be productive or to make things overall simpler? - Stevez
🌝 Peter: Our most recently favorite tool is Notion. We use it as our wiki as well as a place to hold our notes and plans. I highly recommend it!
🌚 As we wrap up, do you have any final words of advice or encouragement to those of us interested in applying for your open roles? - Nate
🌝 Peter: This was a lot of fun! Thanks for having me. 🙂
For those who are interested in getting into VR, I encourage you to build something in Unity! Libraries like VRTK make it incredibly easy to build prototypes in VR. They even have a simulator mode in case you don't have a headset.
If you're interested in working at Metanaut or in our next project, WONDER, join our Discord community!
Have a jawsome day today everyone! 🚀
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Metanaut is one of the first VR studios in Canada and has won some of the world’s largest VR grants & competitions. Our team has backgrounds in industrial design, engineering, interactive arts, and computer science—which helps us apply proven real-world design principles to unfamiliar virtual worlds.
We split our time between the metaverse and Vancouver, and we want you to join us in the journey!
