At 17, I applied for my first ever tech job with the words “jack of all trades” at the top of my resume. I figured this was a good thing; it meant I was flexible and good at everything I did. Employers, unsurprisingly, saw it as a mark of aimlessness, and a career adviser told me to pick one thing and focus on it.

I chose my greatest love, programming, and in the fullness of time I got pretty decent at it. But I wanted more: to invent, craft systems, write, illustrate and design graphics. So after 10 years as a coder, I quit and went indie.

My husband Colin and I spent 5 years traveling the world and making our own small independent games. My first game Rebuild was hugely successful, and solo: I’d done all the design, writing, code, and art myself. It was a flat 2d game of course, because I wouldn’t touch 3d models with a 10 foot pole. I’d taken stabs at all the software – 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, ZBrush – and bounced off each one. I couldn’t get my head around the camera angles; I’d wreck things in the Z axis while working in the X and Y. Watching professionals, I felt I’d need years just to memorize all the hotkeys required to use those tools effectively. I swore I’d never make a 3d game.

Until… VR.

Tilt Brush to be exact. I tried a private demo, waving my arms around to paint great huge solid lines of light. I was completely taken by the medium. My husband was too, and we immediately switched gears and teamed up with Radial Games to write Fantastic Contraption VR, a puzzle game where you grab and snap tinker-toy-like pieces together to make lifesized vehicles. It used those same large arm movements we found so neat in Tilt Brush.

I stayed deeply into Tilt Brush. Some of the early sample art packaged with it was mine. And I’m not – well, I had never considered myself to be an artist. I just found it so incredibly intuitive and easy to use. If you want to draw a line from here to there, you just… move your arm from here to there. Nothing like the frustrations I’d had with traditional 3d modeling software.

I wondered if I could make art assets for a VR game inside VR, and the answer was oh yes you can!

After some experimenting with tools like Medium, Quill, and MasterpieceVR, I discovered Gravity Sketch, and used it to make a little (unreleased) game about gardening on an alien planet. I modeled while sitting cross-legged on my bed, scaling and rotating the object in front of me as I tweaked it, leaning over it to see details, scaling it up to get a sense of how it would feel in the game. The hand motions in Gravity Sketch are so natural, and the basic functions – draw, move, rotate, copy, undo, all mapped to a different button to make creation flow so effortlessly.

I’ve seen the future of 3d modeling, and this is it.

Along the way Colin and I found ourselves in the VR community, and time and again we were intrigued by the incredible art being created. Like Cabbibo’s liquid iridescent creatures made from math, Liz Edward’s paintings which become your whole world when you step into them, or Sean Tann’s interactive rainbow experiments.

VR is a new artistic medium, and the artists experimenting it are wonderfully unbounded in their ideas. We wanted to help connect these artists and share their creations with the world, which is what brought us to create The Museum of Other Realities.

Initially, the MOR was a series of self-enclosed art experiences by a variety of VR-centric artists, joined together via a lobby area with entrances to each one. Entirely digital, the lobby was styled as a traditional brick-and-mortar art gallery with neutral white walls and smaller pieces of art on pedestals.

We thought it’d be neat to make the lobby area multiplayer, so visitors could get that legit museum vibe while watching strangers come and go, or chatting with friends before and after the experiences. The MOR – still in early alpha – began holding monthly “release” parties where all the artists logged on from their respective VR rigs to check out the new exhibit and connect with each other.

Gradually, the separate experiences fell away and the lobby took over the entire project. Today the MOR (still in alpha) contains nearly 100 works from 30 artists. There are full-room art pieces which move and flow around you, interactive dance halls with ribbons of color, tiny dioramas you can teleport down into, a bar and cocktails you can clink, mysterious floating alien jellyfish, motion captured musicians, photogrammetry villages, wearable dresses, roaring dinosaurs, laughing skeletons, spaceships, and at least a couple Sarah Northway originals, made in Tilt Brush.

I have since moved on to my next thing, but Colin and a growing team are still working on the Museum of Other Realities – beta version now available. If you are a VR artist and want to be involved, please get in touch!

October 2016: I created a new repo for a project called “There”. Colin was fascinated by the incredible art and experiences people were creating in VR, and wanted a central place where people could go to enjoy it. It was initially going to be a monthly bundle of VR toys and interactive art connected through a free multiplayer lobby. Over time the lobby grew to become the gallery itself – now known as the Museum of Other Realities.

January 2017: After we added the Level Editor to Fantastic Contraption VR in version 1.6.0, we handed the project off to co-creators Radial Games. They optimized the bejeezus out of it and brought it to the PS VR and Windows MR later that year. Meanwhile…

February 2017: Designer Robin Stethem joined the MOR team. I left to prototype my own VR games.

March 2017: One prototype became Machete Garden, a VR game about exploration and farming on an alien planet. I created the art for it inside my Vive using Gravity Sketch and Tilt Brush. I got all excited about the future of graphics tools, having found 3D modelling suddenly so intuitive and easy in VR. I enjoyed working on the art, something I haven’t done for many of my games.

April 2017: Colin sent out the first multiplayer pre-alpha build of the MOR (called TH-er at the time) to friends and VR artists. The online space was a hit, and monthly updates have followed since then, with a private virtual party to celebrate each time a new exhibit or gallery wing is added.

May 2017: Maris Tammik and Em Halberstadt from A Shell in the Pit Audio began adding sound to the MOR.

August 2017: I shelved Machete Garden.

I just couldn’t see myself wanting to play this game, as it was more about enjoying the space and discovering new species than any serious strategy. I’d hoped to release it through one of the MOR’s monthly interactive experience bundles, but as that project pivoted towards an art gallery I had to consider releasing Machete Garden as a standalone game. I felt that would be pointless unless I radically deepened the gameplay.

I was also sick to death of fighting with 3D physics and optimizing 3D graphics. And finally, I wanted to tell the story of why you’d volunteered to come to this lonely planet, but was faced with having to do it using full voice recording and no justifiable budget. I decided some of these problems may just solve themselves in a few years, and decided to put Machete Garden – and VR – aside for now.

Also August 2017: I started a new game, initially codenamed Princess of Mars and now called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. More about it soon!

January 2018: The Museum of Other Realities was incorporated into its own thing separate from Northway Games. It’s so big you can easily get lost in it now. 30+ works range from intricate tilt brush pieces on pedestals, to recreated 3D photogrammetry ruins, to a whimsical rainbow dance room, to a giant skull filled with creepy cackling skeletons.

April 2018: The MOR was so bursting at the seams with art that Colin and Robin added a second floor. They started experimenting with a donation system, and a strange crypto currency art-purchasing experiment featuring works by John Orion Young.

August 2018: After trying to do all my own art for Exocolonist, I came to my senses and hired two artists to bring my game to life. And this brings us more or less to today. More about Exocolonist including concept art in my next post!