This New VRChat World is Created by Someone Whose Game Worlds Are So Popular, She Now Makes a Full-Time Living Via Fan Donations

Kitchen Versus Kitchen is a zany new world game in VRChat (click here to play) from a mysterious developer known only as Jar. Her hit VRChat worlds are so popular, they account for roughly 1 in 10 of the virtual world's total user activity, and are more popular than most VR games made by established game companies. (Seriously: More on that below.)

This new game, as you might imagine, takes its inspiration from solo/local co-op cooking games which seem ideal when translated into a social VR setting. 

"I've played games like Overcooked and Diner Dash before and really enjoyed them with friends, and since VRChat is a social game it just seemed like a natural fit to do something similar," she tells me. "Also game mode aside, there was (and still is?) just an overall lack of worlds with cooking activities and everyone loves cooking, myself included."

As is screamingly apparent from the trailer above, the race to cook the right recipe in time quickly leads to all kinds of culinary mayhem. Getting all that to work in VRChat on a technical level, says Jar, was no easy job:

"Networking this game was a bit of a nightmare-turned-learning-experience," as she puts it. "Out of all the games I've made so far, Kitchen Cooks by far uses the most pickup objects in the world, and for the Kitchen Versus Kitchen world there are twice as many. There are just so many different ingredients to pick up, throw around, and combine in this game. Plus the competitive nature of this game makes latency a major concern."

She even had to rewrite her code to improve on the way VRChat handles player-to-player objects on the server side:

"For example simply putting a patty on a bun might take several seconds of mashing the two objects together before they would combine into a hamburger. That's when I decided to just go back to the drawing board and rewrite all the pickup related code using some new tricks I found."

While that sounds like something a professional game developer would say, Jar prefers not to say if she has a real life background in that industry -- especially because she's often messaged by people who want to make their own VRChat games, wondering if they need industry experience first.

"They seem worried that world development is too difficult or requires specific knowledge. I always tell them, I believe that you don't need previous education or employment to be successful on this platform, but it does help a little."

In any case, Jar's VRChat games are more popular than most professionally made VR titles. Since launching last December, her survival co-op game world Murder 4 has been visited nearly 8 million times, and her two most popular games typically attract 2,000 to 4,000 concurrent players at any given time. By contrast, as I write this, only 1,800 people are playing Beat Saber on Steam, while less than 600 are playing Half-Life: Alyx (according to VRLFG) -- and those are among Steam's most popular VR titles.

Then again, VRChat's user currency is 34,303 right now. In other words, 12% of the virtual world's entire concurrency is in-world thanks to Jar.

 But speaking of professional game developers, Jar is already just that, due solely to VRChat:

Thanks to contributions from her massive community of fans (over 2,500 in her Discord server alone, her moderator missingnickel tells me), she now earns over $3200 a month through Patreon. That's made making VRChat games Jar's job:

"I feel so much more liberated," Jar tells me. "Being able to do what I actually enjoy doing during the day is working wonders for my personal well-being. Like a kid in a candy store, I have a huge list of ideas, and I get to choose whichever ones I am most passionate about."

It's given her an almost daunting level of creative freedom, but also supports her through the inevitable periods needed to keep her games running smoothly: "Especially when it comes to making sure the technical bugs in my world are under control... that can be a little stressful, and while I'm used to that kind of work by now, supporting those worlds is more important now that it's my livelihood."

But, adds Jar: "Overall though, my heart and mind are at ease, having saved a bit of money from my first year on Patreon in my bank account, and knowing that the patrons who support me now do so because they trust my creative decisions."

Much thanks to Adeon Writer for the tip!

Comments

[Randall Ulysses Pongman]

Now I have another game to try.

[NiranV]

I just wish Jar would actually go back and fix the Among Us world.

Every update has been breaking it more and more, its spectacular how much this map breaks. Every time i see the version counter go up by one i find new bugs. I love the Among Us map (been playing it for over 1000 hours) but we're starting to go into Gothic 3 levels of buggy.

Not to mention another Among Us map would be great... or simply allowing more players... giving more options and so on.