I’m pleased to share that OCP raised an additional $16.25 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s new gaming-focused fund, Games Fund One, led by general partner Andrew Chen. We are also joined with participation by our existing investors: Upfront Ventures and Everblue Management. This additional funding will accelerate our efforts to empower every player to become an active participant in game creation.
Humans are natural storytellers. Communal storytelling around a campfire is one of the most powerful shared images precisely because we hold a universal desire to create and share stories. Today, we feel that desire most intensely through games. Games are the dominant modern art—an interactive medium that brings together the best parts of prior art forms: music, sculpture, painting, architecture, film, and storytelling. The creative complexity of weaving together these art forms makes games awesome, but it also makes them notoriously difficult to build.
Modern game development processes and tools have ignored this creative complexity. Instead, they have been designed and tuned for industry professionals, working on large teams of technical and artistic experts. Attempts to democratize game development have so far focused purely on technical simplification of tools. This leaves game creation needlessly difficult and requires a player-turned-creator to weave together multiple artistic disciplines on a blank canvas—a massive creative challenge. We’re going to change that.
OCP’s mission is to make game creation accessible to every player by tackling both the creative and technical challenges of game creation. To accomplish this, we’re building two projects, codenamed CreatorLab and Muse. CreatorLab is a tightly focused sandbox that contains only the tools necessary to express novel game design in an intuitive and accessible way. It’s not a general purpose engine, but a clean, minimal palette of tools that is highly relevant to any creator. As we build CreatorLab, we are using it to simultaneously build a full-featured social game—Muse. With Muse, the OCP team is orchestrating all of the complexity of game creation so that a player can take Muse as a base and modify or extend it as far as their imagination will take them. Because Muse is a full-featured game, players can focus solely on the aspects they want to modify and trust that OCP has taken care of the rest. A player can use CreatorLab to modify Muse and change a weapon, redesign an NPC, or make their own quest. These changes instantly and seamlessly work with the living world of Muse. Players can make a single change or make a series of changes and turn Muse into a completely new experience of their choosing.
“As we look to the future, we are excited to see how the right modding systems can turn siloed games into platforms, and how the next generation of indie developers can leverage the work of developers before them. We believe the OCP team is leading the charge here, and we’re ecstatic to support them on the next phase of their journey!” Andrew Chen, general partner at A16Z
The combination of Muse and CreatorLab will put the power to craft stories squarely in the hands of players. But stories aren’t only meant to be created, they’re meant to be told. To enable this, we’re building social and community tools directly into CreatorLab. Players-turned-creators will have everything they need to share their creations and build communities with CreatorLab. The details of OCP’s creator-focused social and community tools are under wraps for now, but we’re excited to share more in the future. Games have already become the focal point around which we form communities and connect with our friends. By putting the power to craft stories into players’ hands and giving them a platform to share and tell those stories, we hope to bring the magic and communal intimacy of sitting around a campfire with friends to digital gaming.
“It's been incredible watching Mike and Nick start from scratch a year ago and bring together a world class team of industry veterans that are making rapid progress on CreatorLab and Muse. The OCP team is composed of some of the best engineers, artists, designers and community builders from gaming companies like Epic Games, Valve, id Software, Roblox, ArenaNet and Bungie.” Kevin Zhang, partner at Upfront Ventures
OCP is a fully remote and international team, with people across the US, Europe, and APAC. We’re actively hiring. If you’re excited about our mission and want to contribute to Muse or CreatorLab, please take a look at our openings at ocp.gg/jobs or reach out at contact [at] ocp.gg