Today we’d like to introduce you to Joey Lee.
Joey, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I moved to LA in Sept 2017 after leaving my event design job in Washington, DC. I came here in pursuit of the games industry but quickly found myself in another events job with GPJ to get stable in a new city. I also happened to have this short demo I created of a VR haunted house and only had one jump scare and filmed a supercut of my DC friends getting scared. During this time, I was networking around the LA scene and quickly met a lot of young and talented individuals who saw my short video and wanted to attempt at creating a horror VR game. Over time more and more friends joined the team and we would spend one day per week (dev day Sundays) and eventually had a product to release October 2019 called Reiko’s Fragments.
Reiko’s Fragments is an Asymmetric VR game that allowed anyone with internet access from a web browser via phone or computers to set traps and scare the VR player in Real-Time from anywhere in the world. After launch, we were surprised how the streaming community turned the game into a Twitch stream vs Chat game and anyone watching can join in on the scares Live. The same Pixel Canvas team kept adding updates and features to Reikos but the unexpected happened in March 2020.
COVID 19 and the quarantine threw some Location Based VR plans we had for Reikos at the arcades so we decided to pivot into the Virtual Events space. I was still working at GPJ a live events company at the day job and was listening to all the suggestions on how to continue the business virtually. After sitting in on many meetings, I decided I already knew a company that can do everything virtual events and better than what was out there. So we pivoted the Pixel Canvas team to work on our new virtual events platform that brings hyper-realistic graphics to any device via cloud streaming and a custom build webchat system for attendees to network all experienced within a single tab in a web browser.
So far, we’ve officially launched our first virtual event with Verizon and WXR Fund on August 26 and the reception have been overwhelming positive and we’re hoping there’s many more to come!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There were definitely many challenges along the way. The amount of time I spend thinking about the game and now the virtual events platform does consume a lot of my free time. So one of the challenges is knowing how to keep a work-life balance. With that said the biggest challenge is the team and friends that joined me on this venture. How do you keep everyone motivated and happy with what we’re creating has been something I didn’t have an exact answer to but people always ask how did you keep that culture. I would say it’s all about making it feel like we were all just hanging out on a weekly basis and hanging out, eating lunch at new restaurants and also just happened to work on a cool project. Also, the project had to contently progress and we would also get these public gigs at events and conventions to see complete strangers have fun and laugh at a game we were working on so it was motivating the team to keep going.
Please tell us about Pixel Canvas Studios.
Pixel Canvas started out as a VR game company but has now shifted into developing a Virtual Events platform during our days in a pandemic. However, we plan to also develop video games on the side because the team is passionate about gaming and is something we’ll always do. I’m the Chief Creative Officer and I specialize in designing the characters, environments and 3D modeling, optimization, and lighting within the Unreal Engine. I’m most proud of the company for the culture. We’re a group of young kids that wanted to build cool stuff and we’re completely remote. We would hold all our meetings on discord and continue to be efficient without any hiccups during the quarantine because we were already doing this. What sets us apart is the different backgrounds a lot of the members have. We have game and web programmers, artists that have live event design backgrounds including myself. It’s this unique mix of people that have the industry experience to create a virtual events platform that immerses you in an environment that is interactive and has the networking capabilities found in zoom.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Wow, tough question. I would say the first time I played the PS2 during Christmas when I was in middle school. That was a life-changing moment where I knew exactly what I wanted to do when growing up. A video game developer.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pixelcanvas.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PixelCanvasEvents
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