cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Reflection of my VrJam experience after milestone 4 deadline

ricard2798
Honored Guest
So now that the dust has settled, and all submissions are in (or should be), I would like to take a time to think about my overall VRJam experience up to this point. There is nothing technical here. Some of the info might be wrong (since its my impression, not my researched comments). So anyways, lets get started:

THE GOOD:
1-This experience has made me discover things in me i didn't know i had, or could do. From someone who can't write a single line of code, I had set up to see if i could be something good with my limited skills. The result satisfies me tremendously, and i have only Oculus to thank for enticing me to push myself to new horizons.

2-The VR community is awesome! It has been a great run, and in the process i have communicated with friends that have helped me when i reached a wall i could not climb. Their feedback helped me build a better game (in fact, one persons comments made me want do an additional level just for him...). i will surely miss the camaraderie and support of all the people here... love ya tons

3-look at all this content!!! This is amazing... my gearvr will have tons of new stuff to show off.


The bad:
I am not complaining... i am just sharing things that perhaps could be improved.

1-issues with unity 5. Just like all the entrants spent sleepless night building their Vr content, oculus should have had their coders do the same thing to had a FULLY non issue version of the SDk for unity 5. Some people ended up being limited into what they could do because unity 5 integration was a hurdle.

2-issues with challenge post. i wont get into it... its not oculus fault... but this last 12 hours have been.... interesting.

3-Setting a limit on the entries that will actually see a judge. Think about it... you are denying a hard worker the chance to show off their stuff... not because their software was bad, but because you are only allowing 20% entrants through the gate! So some apps, which might truly be great, will be shot down, just because others might be better! i know this is not an issue as far as the prizes... but some of us are not necessarily after the prize... but more after the honor of saying "hey look, my app made it to round 4... so i am good!"... can you imagine how many doors it can open for a struggling developer to say, hey... the oculus top staff played and reviewed my game?!!! For some of us thats even more important than the prize (i would not mind that either, but that,s not the objective). I know that the oculus head team cant see all entries... but this is what i would have done.
I would rate the apps as good or not good. in fact, even if an app is not great, but shows great effort, it should get a chance to get seen. Its the least that you guys could do for a hard working developer. You can't judge everyone under the same scope... for example... i know there are entries made by groups and organizations that likely entered as individuals. Kind of unfair to the lonely guy that didn't sleep 2 weeks straight to build something of equal (or perhaps even greater magnitude). Again, I would have allowed anything decent (regardless of numbers) to had their chance at the limelight... and at least get the tittle of (i made it through all stages of the jam... even if i didn't win zilch). Hey, we put the time building content for you... and you put the time looking at it.

4-Even playing field. This was touch on my previous points. it sucks that entries in the single category definitely seem to be working in a group multi dev structure. unfortunately, I can;t think of a way to solve this... it juts something that kind of makes me a little sad.

5-Struggle to find testers. As the deadlines came closer... people were literally begging for testers. Of course, everyone was hard at crunching their last efforts, so i understand why there was a limited number of testers. Perhaps, for fure jams, oculus could make a pool of small prizes for people that actually test. lets say.. every time you test, you file a form which the dev will sign of as (approved). that wilkl get the tester one entry into a drawing for lets say, the new oculus... or swag, or a small monetary prize. An app is only as good as it gets tested... and helping have an available pool of testers would help us tremendously.

Anyways, I hope this helps the oculus team in the future. again, i am not complaining one bit.. just sharing my thoughts. Again, I am eternally grateful for this experience... and wish everyone good luck and success.
31 REPLIES 31

emolano
Honored Guest
The vrjam has been a great experience. I realized two main things during the vrjam.

First, making games is so hard. Z Race was my first game. First time with Unity. So I spent many hours on this project.
Games is also a hard market. I thought I could learn and make a living with games but now I am not so sure - It takes a lot to create a game, take a lot of time, it is expensive if you are on your own and cannot create assets so you buy them.
I may stay with my day job 🙂

Two, I love Unity and hate Unity. I used the recommended version 4.6.3, it worked fine for Z Race. In my dream land I wanted to submit 2 games 🙂 - 12 hours before the deadline, I was working in my second game and got the black screen in the Note 4. I tried for 4 hours and could not make it work. At the end I could not create an apk for my second game. I hate Unity. On the other hand using plugins and assets from the asset store make your life easier (but at the end you end up with the same assets so your game looks like many other games)

What i learn't is optimization is NOT a thing you do right at the end.
I will add to that, do not test on Gear VR at the end.
This was my big mistake. I developed on windows making sure to have 50 draw calls and 50k triangles. Did all testing without oculus. Then at the end I used oculus on windows and realized I needed to change some things.
On top of that when I tested it on Gear VR I saw more things to be changed. Performance was bad. My zombie game is fun with 30 zombies at the same time but in GearVR I can only use 7 because they use a lot of resources.

MaximMiheyenko
Honored Guest
Thank you, all VR colleagues for your AWESOME increddible work on VR jam 2015. Really awesome experience !!! :ugeek:
Maxim Miheyenko, VR Production. House of Languages: viewtopic.php?f=77&t=22268&start=40

RazTOO
Honored Guest
"emolano" wrote:


What i learn't is optimization is NOT a thing you do right at the end.
I will add to that, do not test on Gear VR at the end.
This was my big mistake. I developed on windows making sure to have 50 draw calls and 50k triangles. Did all testing without oculus. Then at the end I used oculus on windows and realized I needed to change some things.


Let me add something more here too 🙂 We had a problem with Unity5 tagging system. Our code was working fine on PC, but when we ran it under GearVR it didn't worked... so instead of adding some more fun stuff which was totally ready to put into the game, we had to manually change many lines of code and... made it in the last minute. A big THX to SPINALJACK here and other collegues 😄 So many talented and awesome people here.

We've learned a lot during this Jam and are happy we could participate and achieve our goals.
My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiusRc ... uNEoUS9g4A DracoDux - VRInput (under Development) https://youtu.be/GRRADXH5yzQ Dungeon Escape https://youtu.be/-AvUolM8Uxc

branditoson
Honored Guest
"Binary" wrote:
It was indeed a ride, and now ... this emptiness! 🙂
The could have at least kept up the global signing tool.


Due to popular demand, we brought back up the signing tool and will keep it live until the end of the community voting period. We will post info about this in a broad update soon.

To be clear, you cannot update your submission, but you may share new build link iterations with the community in the comments on your site (or here on the forums) in case you want to leverage the community voting period for playtest feedback and iteration.

branditoson
Honored Guest
Also, thanks all for the feedback! We'll send out a survey after the dust settles to collect this info more broadly. 🙂

rjmig88
Honored Guest
I had a few learning experiences along the way. The first couple of weeks I was having to deal with Unity 5/Exynos bugs like the left eye rendering differently, texture leaking/flopping, and ZWrite Off not working on Unity 5. I started the tech early and even so those issues ate into a week of game jam time.

I wished I tested on more platforms and bought a Snapdragon version of the phone. I had ordered the Exynos version by mistake as I had to buy out of contract on my cell phone plan. I've been getting some reports that my keybindings aren't working on the Snapdragon phone which is quite disappointing since I outsourced InControl for gamepad input and didn't think about buying a bunch of gamepads and doing a test matrix of device compatibility.

I'm glad I spent so much time optimizing for the GearVR. That was my hugest shock. Pretty much every day required optimizations with my level designer and it was non stop. Our entire game renders in 20 draw calls and stays under 100k polys and manages to keep a constant 60 fps. Doing an open world game was a huge challenge even optimizing it from the start. We had to make some tradeoffs as we couldn't have more than 5-6 reasonable quality skinned meshes on screen. We had to be aggressive with culling of skinned mesh objects. I have a few ideas on how to get 20-30 on screen which I'll explore more.

The gameplay went really well. At least for me the head tracking targeting feels really natural. My goal was to improve the ranged combat of Herobound and I feel like I've accomplished that. I'm excited to push the VR RPG experience forward.

The game jam shows me that I want to keep continuing developing Awakening full time and get it to an awesome state on GearVR and DK2 and Crescent Bay ASAP. 🙂 I want to give you guys a lot more than just a single awesome dragon fight!

berlin3d
Honored Guest
Best thing I take from the jam is that i have the feeling I extended my skills in coding and using libs i always wanted to give a try (like the awsome RAIN for AI eg.)
Optimizing draw calls while keeping a high visual quality took really more time than I thought in the beginning. But I learned so much in in this area too because there was this strict barrier of 100 draw calls. In the End I think it was a good thing because you had to try different techniques or even build your level in a special which way gave me a better understanding of what costs performance. I'm sure this will help me while adding new features to S.P.Y. Robot and for all future projects.
CEOs Pet Software @ceospet

creat326
Protege
Well, well... I actually had a blast not sleeping for almost 2 weeks straight. I've been developing since I was a kid and I love when something gets me hyped up to this level at my age!

Some comments on the original post:
1) Team vs Individuals. Yeah I think this was not fair but it's also difficult to control. For instance, I joined the Jam as a company due to pure legal issues because the Unity assets I bought and much of my code is owned by the company. BUT, it's only me. I'm the CEO/Developer/Designer/3D Artist/Kitchen Cleaner/Laundry Picker/Ironing Master/Dog Walker. So it is hard to limit team vs individuals because you just don't know who is truly behind the scenes.

2) Learn to leverage outside resources. Also you can say something like don't reinvent the wheel. You see... my game is a multiplayer flight simulator (check my signature). It has terrain, lakes, 30 airplanes, tanks, soldiers, zeppelins, clouds, snow, rain, sun, night time and connects to a cloud system that runs in 4 continents when you play on multiplayer.
As I said before, it's only me doing it all. So 1 month, 1 man, all of that. I had to really focus on purchasing things from Unity asset store that would speed up the whole process. So I spent considerable time before the VRJam even began to check everything available, calculating costs and putting things together to hit the floor running.

3) Pick the right technology and test it before beginning the jam. This was probably my biggest mistake. I used Unity 5 which I'm very familiar with as a betatester and it's a product that I love... but... I had no idea that the integration with Gear VR was still so buggy. I probably wasted almost 2 weeks just working around bugs. Some got fixed on a Unity patch and some by the new Oculus SDK. But I watched how many projects using Unity 4.6 were moving along just fine!
I think this was great for Unity because they've must gotten tons of bug reports and the next 5.x will have so many fixes (and trust me, the next Unity update should be awesome thanks to this!). But many of us were stuck for days trying to figure out how to move on or just rolling back.

4) Do it for love but don't lose sight of the cost. This is not mentioned but getting into the VrJam is expensive. Not only the devices are expensive but also working non-stop for a month reduces your probably of work for anything else... and your chances of getting a prize are small. So really really think what's our budget for this. My takeaway is that you have to do it for the love of just doing it. I picked up a project that I'm crazy passionate about, that I work on it even if there is not VrJam going on and I just personally have a blast developing.

5) Don't forget to check my project 🙂 I hope you like it and forgive my horrible English O:) http://challengepost.com/software/dogfight-elite-vr
Dogfight Elite now available for Oculus https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3881629141886138/

Binary
Honored Guest
Though i entered as individual and worked alone, i'd like to defend the teams a bit at the point of fairness.

For every hat you cant or wont wear yourself you could by cheap or use even free resources. You could have even easily teamed up yourself, here or on challenge post. There where reasons you didn't. Beyond that, you can make a exciting game with simple design and exciting game play. The jam submissions are proof enough.
Working in a team has its own challenges, probably many entries didn't make it for social reasons. Tough teams are able to deliver more polished and more unique, if they have designer, the judges are industry veterans who look beyond that. ( so i hope 😉 )

MimicryGames
Explorer
Ricard and others, thanks so much for sharing your experience. :ugeek: I think it's important to reflect and learn from each other.

I also decided to write up a jam postmortem on my devlog that I wanted to share with you guys, here is the direct link to the post: http://mimicryvr.tumblr.com/post/119090873459/vrjam-postmortem-reflecting-on-the-jam-process
Creator of Ganbatte, a competitive social multiplayer arcade game for VR, about cats, in space, eating sushi. Follow our journey as we bring this game to the Oculus store: ☆ Check out the Ganbatte dev blog ☆ ★ Follow Mimicry on Twitter