Rooms.xyz

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duckqlz

Really interesting concept. The most intriguing part is the ability to add LLM functionality directly in your code. From the documentation:

```

local PRIMER =

  "You are a sushi chef in a sushi restaurant. " ..

  "You are kind and cheerful and excited about offering " ..
  
  "different kinds of sushi to the customer."

function onClick()

  aiCharacter(PRIMER)

end

```

This opens up a world of possibilities for a casual game developer and there are many other interesting features. I would love to read more about how they are controlling cost on their api searches with the LLM. I look forward to seeing more from rooms.xyz.

[1] - https://rooms.xyz/docs#aiCharacter

issafram

I was recruited to a company maybe 6 years ago which did something similar to this site. For the life of me I couldn't understand what the business model was. Thankfully I didn't accept their offer and I haven't heard of them since.

echelon

Rooms.xyz is going to pitch

- metaverse

- creator marketplace and consumer flywheel

- environment for learning agents, "we'll be first to AGI", "there's no better way to deploy a learning agent than a game" (so many game AI companies are doing this)

Then they'll raise $20M from a16z or someone.

I'm only being half sarcastic here, because I do see a way in which they could execute on that plan and build value. But it's also humorous to poke a little fun, because there is so much irony in the world around us right now.

Platforms like VRChat and Roblox are no joke though. It'll be hard for these folks to match that level of success, but I wish them luck nonetheless.

Edit: nailed it. They raised $10M, and I knew it would be a fit for a16z.

rsp1984

> Edit: nailed it. They raised $10M, and I knew it would be a fit for a16z.

Source?

celestialcheese

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

echelon

I could have included a citation, but in general Crunchbase has the details you need on most startups. It's a great go to.

undefined

[deleted]

white_dragon88

[dead]

somethoughts

Interesting set of tutorials:

https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-...

Here's the Lua API documentation - pretty extensive!

https://rooms.xyz/docs

I'm surprised they don't list these off the landing page.

I'm unclear about the business model too - seems like it could be an interesting option for learning coding after Scratch, Python Turtle, etc.

Interestingly I noticed they got some seed funding from A16Z but as far as I know Scratch is supported via philanthropy which A16Z is not. Pretty cool - hopefully they go the edtech route versus NFT/Roblox heavy on the monetization route!

Edit: Found their Youtube channel which explains a bit more about the goals and has some video tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWbWmXoRHm0

Also the requisite TC launch article:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

Good timing on the launch - just in time for kids getting off for summer break!

leovander

Reminds me of Solana Portals. https://theportal.to/

prakhar897

Well polished, but this is literally "Habbo Hotel".

There were a number of issues which lead to Habbo's downfall:

1. Anarcho Capitalism: Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field. This video explains this in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6jxjKPNZQ

2. Politically Incorrect Stuff: Lots of non conforming stuff happened. some of which actually made it to mainstream news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp2EZbbuMa0

3. Scams: Kids are the easiest demography to scam. It also teaches them at an early age how to scam people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDPTiFHfcs

Although right now this product is a bit different than Habbo, but how do the founders plan to address these? Especially the political one since anyone can make anything right now.

Edit: Sorry I edited the comment after realizing its Habbo.

astroalex

Except for the superficial similarity of an orthographic 3D view, this seems nothing like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo hotel was multiplayer and had in-game chat. Rooms.xyz does not appear to be multiplayer in that way.

Habbo hotel had an in-game currency that you used to buy objects / furniture. Rooms.xyz has no in game currency (that I can tell).

Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

Rooms and Habbo are nothing alike except for the similarity of art style. Habbo hotel is basically a glorified chat room, whereas Rooms seems like a Unity game engine for kids.

Of course, content moderation is a challenging issue for any tool that allows the creation and sharing of content, I agree with you there. But that’s not a challenge unique to Habbo Hotel!

kbenson

> Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

The the first link in GP, there apparently was programming in habbo, and when actual random number generators (dice) were limited in a effort to curtail gambling was used I lieu of dice but wasnt visible or verified as part of the game engine to actually be random in the specified way.

mmastrac

IIRC they have VC funding so it's very likely in-game currency will show up.

Xelynega

Habbo hotel had "programmable logic" that facilitated the scams, gambling, and capitalism.

Habbo was not a "glorified chatroom", it was an MMO centered around an in-game currency and acquiring more of it.

JSavageOne

Do you have any sources that aren't videos? Curious about this, but don't care enough to sit through 10 minute videos.

In any case I don't see any issues with something being "politically incorrect", unless that's a euphemism for something else.

SSLy

If I were to wager a guess PI here means straight out nazi imagery.

RobotToaster

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pools-closed

nonethewiser

That sounds innocuous.

nbar1

and yet you're wrong...

thih9

> Habbo (formerly Habbo Hotel) is an online community aimed at teens and young adults. (...) Founded in 2000, Habbo has expanded to nine online communities (or "hotels"), with users from more than 150 countries.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo

Onavo

It's looks like a clone of https://bondee.com

xwdv

Why address it? This is part of the fun of these online games. Ultima Online had similar issues, except you could straight up kill people.

littlecranky67

Looks like the key difference is that there are no corporate-generated unique/scarce items (that increase in value) as everybody is able to create everything themselves.

Wowfunhappy

Based on the first video at least, Habbo Hotel looks like it has almost nothing in common with rooms.xyz.

tetris11

I was thinking the same. Maybe if there was multiplayer, it could be a hangout space? But hangout and do what.

Teens mostly game online together, so the rooms could be a portal for accessing some kind of shared resource (private music or video colection, logins to other sites). Or it could be turned into a game itself and a fun collab space to polish a game in-universe

kator

This reminds me of Metaplace[0][1] back in 2007 created by a MMO veteran Raph Koster. Not sure how they will avoid the same issues that killed Metaplace and other attempts at this over the years.

    [0] https://www.raphkoster.com/2021/09/02/online-world-or-metaverse/
    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace

rgbrgb

Interesting comparison. What killed metaplace?

miyuru

Looks kinda like the Habbo game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo

mihird9

As someone else commented above, it is surprisingly similar to https://bondee.com. Almost a rip-off.

MattRix

Rooms seems like a very different style of product (not built around the social/chatting stuff). Also those kind of isometric hexagon rooms have been around for ever in loads of different places.

neom

Made by these guys: https://things.inc/

Seems cool: https://rooms.xyz/alex/crossy

chaosprint

love the concept. maybe it's just me, but the experience is quite uncomfortable(dizzy) for me when I use the arrow key to move and find the character moving in a rotated direction

mihird9

The TechCrunch article mentions that they downsized (i.e. fired all non-founder employees) to just the three co-founders, before launch.

That seems kinda shady to me.

caturopath

> The startup — Things Inc. — was founded in 2021, raising $8 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and $2 million from various angel investors, including Adobe’s Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, among others. After burning funds too quickly at first, the team downsized their 10-person team to just the three founders in order to maintain enough runway. Now, Rooms.xyz has somewhere around four-plus years, Toff says.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

morgante

That still seems kind of odd. At 10 person team, assuming ~$250k annual cost per employee, should have a runway of 4 years. Something else must have happened (ex. dramatic pivot; profligate spending early on) to necessitate layoffs right now.

mihird9

I mean, how does a company hire 7 employees based on the funding/money they've raised, and then layoff every single one of those 7 hired employees in a span of about 1 year? With such planning/decision making, and no business model in place, how do VCs even fund them in the first place?

gameman144

Eh, better to downsize than to run the company into the ground. I don't envy the decision, but I see why they made it.

mihird9

Why are people downvoting this? Smh

Biganon

Lovely. It reminds me of a website I used to go to in the early 2000, when I was a kid. It was called L'Escale, ans as a member you had your very own room on a pirate ship, and you could choose your pet from three possibilities, a monkey, a parrot and a cat iirc. It was extremely simple but back then it was amazing to me.

Later I was a member of a 3D universe (created in 1998, mind you), a French speaking "fork" (not really but it's complicated) of ActiveWorlds. It was called Le Village 3D, and as a (paying) member, you had your own lot in the village, a perfectly square area that was yours and on which only you could build (typically a house but not necessarily).

I can totally see the appeal of having your own little cosy space. This is not what it is apparently, but it made me think of it. Here you can create as many rooms as you want, and that's why it's not as beautiful as what I was experiencing back then. It is scarcity I'm missing. Creating an account was complicated. Losing your account was a catastrophe. I cherished what I had.

dopidopHN

I remember using the village 3D for a while.

Nice little community. I was 14 or 15 so I never used the pay plan but Stayed on the « tourist » plan. With a goofy skin and no « property » to build on.

It was still a cool, little clunky thing.

snickmy

Nice, creative, job. not for me, but a lot of work been done here. Wish you all the best

sMarsIntruder

What’s the business model behind this?

I’m genuinely curious.

jasonfolds5

Jason from Rooms.xyz here! We haven't figured out the business model yet, but we figure if this catches on there's probably a way to responsibly make money :-)

somethoughts

Definitely an edtech CodeCombat-like platform route would be ideal coming from a parent (i.e. tutorials, elearning, online private tutoring at $200 per month). CodeCombat is great but definitely more oriented toward the traditional boy oriented programming. Your offering is much more approachable to both boys and girls and higher in graphics quality/aesthetic.

If you need to directly monetize - perhaps an itch.io/Appstore type e-store would be interesting where creators could monetize their cozy style game creations through a straightforward publishing them.

Hopefully if you do want/need to try some sort of Roblox/Fortnite style, monetized open-world version, you can separate it into its own domain (i.e. rooms-world.xyz) and keep rooms.xyz strictly for Scratch like learning experiences. The potential of rooms.xyz as it stands now is great as an edtech platform.

Perhaps some private donor (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc.) could help to buy out the original rooms.xyz from your seed investors and put it into some sort of private foundation (i.e. Scratch Foundation [1], Khan Academy Foundation). You could then be explore growth/monetization IPO-able opportunities through a separate entity while keeping what you guys have already built in tact for the long term.

[1] https://codecombat.com/teachers/resources

[2] https://www.scratchfoundation.org

Jasper_

lmao

spaceman_2020

Since its backed by A16z and has a bunch of .eth accounts tweeting about it, I would assume something related to NFTs.

If NFTs and crypto can make experiments like this sustainable, then I'm all for it.

pavlov

Does someone still tweet with a .eth username? That’s like writing about Beanie Babies on your MySpace. The fad is gone, no matter how hard you try.

stiltzkin

ENS and beanie babyes are nothing a like, maybe research more.

spaceman_2020

It was always a little stupid because the .eth domain didn't really resolve to anything. All it did was give people a chance to see your crypto portfolio if you had any funds on that address.

jasonfolds5

Nothing related to NFTs or crypto in the product or in the plans

junon

This is pretty much the only use case for crypto I see being viable and useful moving forward. I think it's cute and fun and if people want to sink money into hobby stuff like this then nobody should tell them otherwise.

spaceman_2020

There has been a drastic degradation of crypto culture in the last couple of years. From speculation being the trojan horse that was supposed to lead to a decentralized future, it has devolved into speculation being the only use case.

The problem with monetizing anything with crypto in this environment means that people will only buy it for speculative purposes. Which means that instead of building anything sustainable, you just end up building trash and spending on marketing to keep the speculative hype train going.

It’s like running a publicly traded company, but with extremely fickle shareholders.

derefr

Not sure, but it's backed by a16z: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

networked

I can't find information about their actual business model on the site. What could it be? The first thing Rooms.xyz makes me think of is Habbo (Hotel). The developer could sell extra features (through a subscription), premium items, and space to build in. A voxel editor and custom code make premium items a harder sell: you can replicate them if they aren't very complex and you don't care about the social status of using premium items. The primary premium commodity could instead be space: larger rooms and more rooms per account. They could also charge users for highlighting their rooms in a recommendation system, if they cultivate a community that hangs out on the site.

Edit: There is a line about it in https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...:

> Eventually, Rooms could monetize by selling objects for purchase, subscriptions or licensing its software for education, but that’s all very much to be determined at this point.

iamwil

This was the first thing on my mind also. It had too much polish to seem like it was just some curiosity of the internet done for its own sake. Maybe it is?

cinntaile

The company behind this is called Things.inc and they're a VC backed startup. https://twitter.com/ThingsByThings

iamwil

Oh. I guess I can see the pitch. Something like people make their own animal crossing islands, and cozy games are a thing now, so people would want a space of their own.

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