Read the Case Study on the Final Frontier website

Last year, while working as a Creative Technologist at Final Frontier, we received an interesting brief. A group of artists had created a virtual influencer called Wave, basically a metaverse DJ. They were about to release an album and wanted to create an online experience, a place where people could gather virtually to listen to the album. But they had one condition: it had to look good. These were artists who had worked really hard on the visual side of their character, and wanted to showcase that.

So that was the challenge that fell upon me. To find a tech stack, a platform where we could channel this product in a new medium without losing it’s essence. After some research I came to the conclusion that the appropriate platform to do so was Roblox. It was the only platform capable of hosting multiplayer experiences with ease, in an ecosystem where friction to include new users is minimal, and maintaining a reasonable degree of visual quality (Today there’s also Fortnite but this wasn’t available at that time).

So with my decision made I set out to convince the rest of the studio and the clients. I built a demo in four days: I did the creative direction, the gameplay design, the 3D modelling and the development (in a platform which was unknown to me). On the fourth day I presented the concept and everyone was very impressed. That kickstarted a project that lasted around two and a half months, in which I worked alongside a Creative Director in the design of the experience. He handled the modeling and texturing, and I focused on development.

It was very interesting to explore a new game engine, its potentials and limitations. I was very impressed by how intuitive it is to learn and start building; although I missed some features present in more professional engines. Scripting with Lua was certainly a pain in the *.

A cool feature of this platform is that since the release of their Meta app, you can experience this worlds in VR!