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Why aren't you in the finals? (venting thread)

nilstastic
Explorer
So, why aren't you in the finals right now? Unfair screening process? Bugs? Bad luck? Or simply the fact that THE WORLD IS NOT READY FOR A JUMPING GAME. Let's vent here!

First reaction.
My first reaction when not reaching the finals was the classic "screw you guys, I'm going home". I put a whole months work into this, working after the kids got to bed until I was to tired to think. All this felt like wasted time, my heart sunk and the motivation for doing anything VR related just went out the window.

Then I stared at the ceiling for a bit.

Then I mustered up some courage and when I went though the list if found a lot of entries missing that I was sure to reach the finals, and I realized that i was not alone, and that made things a bit better.

The worst part
The wort part for me is that I really like my game, I've spent hours making the boss fight feel just right (for me), inventing lasers and modeling rockets - and It feels kind of sad not many people will be able to experience my vision of the best (and only) jumping game in the world.

But I do also realize that my game is special to me. As the creator I know every part of it, get nostalgic when moving through certain parts of it ("oh, the cold I had when i modeled that laser"). I am sure that everyone that made a game in the jam is connected to their game in a similar way. But that does not make me feel better, just more logical.

End game - what to do next
So, What to do. The screening jury has failed to realize that my game is awesome. Carmack will never be be able to tell me all the mistakes i made in it, and Palmer will never be featured in a stupid .gif jumping like the madman he truly is.

What to do..

Well, I got 25 videos of coworkers playing my game, and I got the exact reaction i was hoping for when they were playing (laughter). I've also gotten some great feedback from the community, and a few good review as well. And I really like my game, not because of nostalgia but because I like jumping, and I like lasers. But then again, Oculus does not like my game, or at least not in the way it needs to be liked. It might be the jumping, it might be the execution. The fact remains the same.

So, should I be a reasonable man and stop here.

Hell no!
I did not quit during the jam, and letting the anti-jumping lobby win is not an option! I'm going to finish the game, and I'll put it in the store where it belongs, judges be damned!

So, save up you dollars kids. Because this fall there will be a jumping game in the store, and it will be AWESOME.

// nils
53 REPLIES 53

creat326
Protege
Can''t you save the analysis on a file? So it analyzes it the first time and then saves the values for the next run. It would run just slow the first time like that (maybe even add a loading screen or a "analysis/decompressing" bar on the first run).
I don't think people would mind waiting 10 or 15 seconds the first time if you don't have to do it again.
Dogfight Elite now available for Oculus https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3881629141886138/

HelloMeow
Explorer
"creat326" wrote:
Can''t you save the analysis on a file? So it analyzes it the first time and then saves the values for the next run. It would run just slow the first time like that (maybe even add a loading screen or a "analysis/decompressing" bar on the first run).
I don't think people would mind waiting 10 or 15 seconds the first time if you don't have to do it again.


It can and it used to do it like that, but it was cumbersome if you wanted to play a lot of different songs.

But this is going completely off topic now 😄
VRJam: Hexagon

dpid
Honored Guest
"ricard2798" wrote:

all done by one single person... on his first jam... so honestly.. i did meet all my goals... so i figure that the problem with my project was the goals... i started with the wrong goals, so i ended with the wrong product to deliver. That is my fault... So if anyone knows a good read, tutorial, or book to help with this, please let me know, cause i really, really really need to know what i did wrong and how to correct it.. that is whats killing me the most


The thing with these types of contests is that you ultimately don't know exactly what the judges were looking for until it's over. Even then, it's kinda cloudy. Same goes for the court of public opinion. So, I feel your frustration, but it's nothing you did wrong per se. Although you didn't get the result you wanted, participating and completing a game is tremendous achievement in itself and can only make you a stronger developer. No tutorial or book has any magic answers. Just keep iterating and making more games. Study other games and form your opinions on what works and doesn't work. Also, often overlooked, but live life and learn things outside of games and bring those elements back in. Keep learning. A successful game will always be a roll of the dice, but you can continually increase the odds in your favor.
Snow Fight VR Jam 2015 submission

Frooxius
Honored Guest
I don't really belong here, since one of my entries made it to the finalists (although another one I had didn't, though I didn't really expect it to), but I just wanted to tell you guys to not lose motivation, especially when community liked your entry.

Remember that there's only a handful of people judging these entries (and they haven't even tried the entries themselves yet, which I consider dumb, but that's whole another topic) and those people have their own tastes and preferences, so even if your entry didn't get picked, it doesn't mean it's bad, but just didn't resonate with the particular set of judges.

If you put a lot of effort into your entry, it's definitely worth it to polish and release it, since the community doesn't comprise of just these few people - it's much more diverse than that and so should be the content we are creating.

TegTap
Honored Guest
I second what everyone said about polishing your game, putting it in the store, and letting it speak for itself to the users who want to play it, rather than dwell too long on a decision made by a small handful of people who didn't even play it at all.

But since this is a venting thread...

After playing some of the finalists' games, I applaud many of them for their stellar work and their great content! These ones earned and deserve a spot on the finalist list! However, after playing some of the other finalists' games... I guess I applaud them for making a sweet video. And completely disregarding the ~500 word limit in the ever-so-important description that so many of us painstakingly adhered to. Based on the judging method, maybe the VR in this particular jam stood for "Video Recording?" After playing some of these finalist games and comparing mine to them, I can honestly say that I can't answer the original question as to why my game isn't in the finals - and why many of your awesome games aren't either. I think a lot of our books were judged by their covers.

I also believe it's unfortunate that there wasn't a consistent set of judges for each entry, or a consistent number of judges that looked at each entry. I feel like that adds even more subjectivity to the selection process, since the wrong combination of judges could adversely affect an entrant, or have the opposite effect (examples - an entrant was judged by a subset who skews low in scoring, or maybe one judge's set of entries happened to contain mostly poor apps, and therefore an entry was pitted only against the poorly done games, skewing that entry higher.) I don't see how there can be a baseline from which to compare entries when not all of the judges review all of the entries.

That being said, I appreciate how hard it must be for the judges to narrow the entries down, even if I'm not in love with the process. I'm sure there are difficulties I'm not even aware of, and I'm sure it was a difficult job. I thank the mods, judges, and oculus in general for organizing this opportunity. And thanks for a venting platform too!

creat326
Protege
"Frooxius" wrote:

Remember that there's only a handful of people judging these entries (and they haven't even tried the entries themselves yet, which I consider dumb, but that's whole another topic) and those people have their own tastes and preferences, so even if your entry didn't get picked, it doesn't mean it's bad, but just didn't resonate with the particular set of judges.

If you put a lot of effort into your entry, it's definitely worth it to polish and release it, since the community doesn't comprise of just these few people - it's much more diverse than that and so should be the content we are creating.


I don't think anyone can argue that. Most of us are not afraid that our games would not be liked when we already saw great reaction from the random people we tested. Hey! I think I've only done one game with less than 1 million downloads! So not slightly worried about that.

The problem is that here there is real prize money. And a serious and considerable amount for an indie developer. You may think I'm swimming on money because I've got games with millions of downloads but all my games are free to play and ads/in-app purchases barely cut the cost of development. If you are into the industry as I am, you know you need to either make your games not free and pray for jackpot or get millions and millions (and I mean dozens of millions) downloads so that ads/in-apps can cover the cost.

So, for those of us that actually need the money to finish the complete game instead of leaving it at a half-done version, this contest was a great opportunity to go for it. The problem arises when some entries on there could potentially win monetary prize, even way more than they need, while other great/better/working games desperate for the funds or a marketing push, are going to be left behind due to an improper filter.

The judging process should be as just as possible. It won't ever be perfect, but base it only on videos instead of actual gameplay it's like giving $ just for the idea while others are doing the actual work without recognition.
Dogfight Elite now available for Oculus https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3881629141886138/

KatieTriPixels
Honored Guest
"creat326" wrote:

So, for those of us that actually need the money to finish the complete game instead of leaving it at a half-done version, this contest was a great opportunity to go for it. The problem arises when some entries on there could potentially win monetary prize, even way more than they need, while other great/better/working games desperate for the funds or a marketing push, are going to be left behind.


You can't tell who needs money and who doesn't based on pictures, video and a jam demo. Maybe they are marketing video creators in their day job, and wanting to start a games company?

As for videos - my MS3 video was just me talking over it with my webcam mic, nothing more. My gameplay one was just a recording of the two halves of the game side by side and didn't even get finished before they closed entries. I'm terrible at editing videos so didn't bother. My screenshots you can tell are from the Unity Editor, didn't try to edit them, just used fraps. But where my talents are is in designing gameplay and passionately talking about it.

They needed that prize fund to encourage a range of developers to try. From one man teams taking a holiday to do it, to larger companies who think that they may be compensated for their efforts but will use the Jam as a PR push. That way, they get a massive range of ideas, and they did.

We probably wouldn't have entered if there was no prize, as it took out our two person team for a month, and a week extra to try and recover from the stress. That's over a month off our main game development, that we're still doing in our spare time after our day jobs, and our first as an indie games company.
______________ @Katie_TriPixels Smash Hit Plunder “is one of Gear VR and indeed VR in general’s most curious and, much more importantly, fun upcoming videogames.” - VRFOCUS

creat326
Protege
Yep, i'm not arguing who needs the money and who doesn't. I'm saying that deciding who can qualify for the prize (and a considerable important one) based solely on the videos and descriptions without any actual game testing, it's not fair to anybody.

The argument is not whether you need the money, neither whether your game is good or bad and should or should not be released to the store. My understanding about the meaning of this thread is whether the system to decide the finalists was fair to you, and if not, why.

In my case I know that if I had been into the finalist list, I would be very happy but I would certainly don't believe that deciding based on the video/description alone was a fair filter. I've tested tons of the entries and many (a pretty big amount), watching the description I was hyped up to download it, and once downloaded and placed on the device my reaction was: you gotta be kidding me. So the videos may allow for very bad entries to go through while leaving behind some awesome ones. Basically it misses the whole huge gap between idea and execution.
Dogfight Elite now available for Oculus https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3881629141886138/

RazTOO
Honored Guest
"creat326" wrote:

So, for those of us that actually need the money to finish the complete game instead of leaving it at a half-done version, this contest was a great opportunity to go for it


This sums everything perfectly IMO!

Adding to this, we actually wanted to add more things like object interaction, where you woud choose something alongside walking through a door or maybe make a short combat scene. Also random events, but we aimed at a very simple game for others to understand.

The important thing for us is that my collegue has done another game and I... done my first ever game 😄 I've use tons of tutorials some references + what i would like in a game on a small android device.
We've put it together in a big package, with a simple idea we really wanted to execute for a 4-10min experience.

I am very happy with the result we've got and never thought, that our game would make so many of our friends smile and meet so many awesome poeple here at the forums.
I'm also running my YT channel from time to time evangelising about VR. I also gather a bunch of people @my univeristy from time to time to test VR together. We had 16 people and we played Dungeon Escape together 🙂 They really liked it and were fascinated by VR. Most of them already played other VR games and were familiar - so unbiased opinions.

We've also played other VRJam builds with Kangaroo Dash, being the most memorable and Crashland Reborn making girls squeek 😛 and Vektron Revenge - ahh those people yelling TRON FTW!!! 😄

We'll probably continue wrapping up our game, just to see other people opinions. They can be bad (heard those too) and we hope we'll get also the good ones too 🙂

We've even got some followers on ChallengePost and likes, which is so awesome for this short period of time.

Sure there was some confussion about the allowed bugfixes builds at some point ...and some quircks during the competition. There were also other "not so OK things" which still kinda bother me, which I won't mention ... so I guess we're all human and we make mistakes right ??? Right.
I can also understand that primarily Oculus wants to promote mobileVR for people, and they won't take any risks in making people think VR is bad for them.

All I am sure is, that we've uploaded a game in the required time window and demands. Most importantly we meet our goals.
We had little to none feedback if our game is working ... but we uploaded our APK at the last moment.
I can only hope that those games/apps who didn't make it ... were at least played by the "pre-selection" team, not only fast-judged by the trailers. If yes then I am totally OK with that.

Special thanks here for people like: spinaljack, matt ratcliffe & others who helped us fight unity5 early bugs 😛
My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiusRc ... uNEoUS9g4A DracoDux - VRInput (under Development) https://youtu.be/GRRADXH5yzQ Dungeon Escape https://youtu.be/-AvUolM8Uxc

Bino
Protege
I'm not in the final because my entry was rubbish (http://challengepost.com/software/telegear). My excuse: I was travelling overseas for work for 3 weeks during the jam 🙂

I'll throw my 2cent that I shared on reddit.


I knew there'd be some butt hurt comments in here. (downvote city here I come) But I actually have to agree that innovation didn't appear to be a consideration across the board for the first round.
Also not sure how SMS Racing (my favourite entry) got through as it's a remake of a previously developed game of the same name and mechanic.
But I don't give shit. The bigger picture is for VR to succeed. Developers got involved, large companies got involved and creativity got involved.
The real winner is VR and I'm happy with that.
It's just a game jam.


I do recall an email stressing how important the video and images are as they are what will be used for round 1. It's not like it was a big secret.

I'll continue developing a GearVR game. And I think everyone here passionate enough to vent should too.
CRT-X (Hotline Miami inspired VR shooter) https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/80394/dr-lucky-duck/p1?new=1 https://twitter.com/superteamone https://www.instagram.com/superteamone/