We recently connected with Jacob Scherer and have shared our conversation below.

Jacob, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I knew I wanted to pursue a more creative path when I lost my IT job of 5 years. I realized that when I lost my job, that no one was going to have my back but myself, and that I was just a number to my workplace. I felt that I needed to do something on my own and I found what I wanted to do was Content Creation. I found that creating things for Virtual Reality (VR) was a very freeing experience, being able to create an environment and then step into said environment is a magical feeling and drove me to learn more about Game Development. I ended up founding UdonVR to try to turn this into a career, and to also take care of the people who’ve joined me on the way.

Jacob, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into my Industry mostly through my friend groups. Not because of business connections I made, but because I wanted to create things for my friends to enjoy. I’ve done this all my life, ever since Middle School, where I would be the friend hosting servers for myself and my friends to play on. I had to figure all of this out by myself at the time which led to me getting a job in IT during High School and being pretty good at it. I learned a lot working there and it eventually led me to where I am now.

We do a lot at UdonVR and I’m spearheading it all. Without getting too technical: Our primary focus is trying to support other creators on the platform (VRChat) by creating tools that help save them time. This is where we’re making our money at the moment and I see it being the thing that keeps us financially afloat in the long term.
We also run a Discord server where people can come to for help learning content creation. For Those who don’t know what Discord is, to put it simply, it’s a Social Media platform where you can create and run Groups/Communities. It’s kind of like Reddit, but it uses Chat Rooms instead of Forums. This doesn’t directly do anything for us financially, but it’s super rewarding and creates a needed public space for people to come learn Programming and Game Development for VRChat. We’ve built a really good small community doing this and we do monthly get-togethers in VRChat each month with turn outs of 30-40 people. We’ve gained a lot of good community members that are constantly helping people, and I’m super proud that we’ve been able to create this space. I love seeing people learn and what things they can create, and I hope that I’m able to keep doing this for as long as I can.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

In my specific area, there weren’t many resources available. Building content for VRChat is a super niche area already and programming for it was extremely new when we got into it, like days old new. The only resources were the very few, and sometimes vague docs that VRChat made for their visual programming language Udon, so there was very little to nothing for the C# version of the language, which was called UdonSharp, or U#. The only way to get information was to take the already little information they had for their visual language, and use it as a loose guide for learning U#. Because of that, I wanted to create a resource for people to come to and learn. VRChat is a great motivator to learn how to use Unity, Blender, and Programming in C#. You meet new people, build friend groups, and want to create content to share with your new friend group. It pushes you to learn so you can create experiences for those people. It gave me the initial push I was looking for to learn Unity at first, and it later gave me projects to actually apply the fragments of programming I learned though high school, and turn that into me truly learning a programming language. Programming no longer was something that I touched just for class or occasionally played with for a throwaway project. VRChat gave me that along with the friends I made that helped motivate me to learn and I’m super grateful to the even fewer friends I’ve made that actually helped me learn.

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Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

In my specific area, there weren’t many resources available. Building content for VRChat is a super niche area already and programming for it was extremely new when we got into it, like days old new. The only resources were the very few, and sometimes vague docs that VRChat made for their visual programming language Udon, so there was very little to nothing for the C# version of the language, which was called UdonSharp, or U#. The only way to get information was to take the already little information they had for their visual language, and use it as a loose guide for learning U#. Because of that, I wanted to create a resource for people to come to and learn. VRChat is a great motivator to learn how to use Unity, Blender, and Programming in C#. You meet new people, build friend groups, and want to create content to share with your new friend group. It pushes you to learn so you can create experiences for those people. It gave me the initial push I was looking for to learn Unity at first, and it later gave me projects to actually apply the fragments of programming I learned though high school, and turn that into me truly learning a programming language. Programming no longer was something that I touched just for class or occasionally played with for a throwaway project. VRChat gave me that along with the friends I made that helped motivate me to learn and I’m super grateful to the even fewer friends I’ve made that actually helped me learn.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

One of my biggest struggles is motivation. Unlike the IT job I had for a while, where my biggest struggle was trying to go to a place that I felt hated me and my co-workers, going out on my own meant I now needed to find a way to motivate myself to not only work, but to create work for myself. Running a community that people go to for help is easy to get motivated to do, because people come to you for help, and you just do your best to try and get them what they need. For better or for worse, I don’t like doing commission work, which meant we needed to figure out what to do for income. There was a lot of trial and error here, trying to make something that people actually wanted to use. It’s hard to stay motivated with a project when no one’s using it, or even getting it out the door in the first place. I have a long list of dead projects to my name, but you grow with everything that you do, whether it’s released or not. I’m still trying to figure out how to keep myself motivated today, and I think it’s going to be something I struggle with for a while. I think one of my biggest roadblocks to creating things is that I really enjoy the learning process. That might sound good, and it is when I want to pick up new things, but once that learning process is over I quickly want to jump to something else, so getting things actually finished is a struggle. It’s something I’m trying to actively work on at this very moment.

Contact Info:

• Website: UdonVR.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/UdonVr
• Youtube: https://youtube.UdonVR.com/
• Other: https://kofi.UdonVR.com/ https://patreon.UdonVR.com/