indie games studio
They've just announced the winners! We nabbed Silver which is worth $50,000 and further cements our VR know-how. (For anyone keeping score that makes 3 for 3 on competition winnings) 
Can't wait to get stuck in to more VR stuff (after getting out Kaiju Panic of course) XD
We are still buzzing from completing the Oculus VR Jam and getting selected as finalists so even though I don't normally write project retrospectives the Oculus community has been so positive that I feel like giving something back (however small).
We're very grateful of Oculus and Unity for hosting this game jam and for all the effort they are going to for judging the entries and we're also very pleased and humbled to have been selected as a finalist.
But first of all a small gripe: Not every game that we thought were amazing made it to the finals and some rather dubious entries did. This maybe be due to the fact that the finalist were selected purely based on descriptions and videos and that each entry was reviewed by (at least) 3 random judges (which might lead to score skewing). This method makes sense due to the sheer volume of entries but is less than ideal for all the hard working innovative devs who didn't get selected.
You might think being up against a weaker selection of games would give us a better chance at a prize but we'd much rather see all the truly innovative games get the exposure of being a finalist.
Anyway, usually post-mortems follow the 5 wrongs and 5 rights format so without further-ado:
Game jam is over now and it was loads of fun. If you have 2 Gear VRs (or don't mind fiddling with port setting) you can download the APK at the below link.
http://challengepost.com/software/neuralgia-vr
Don't forget to vote for us!
ElementL got 6th place in the 3D Jam
I knew who the top 3 were going to be straight away so it's no surprise we didn't take top spot but still happy with the entry we made. Congratulations to all the contestants
Razer showing off their OSVR to punters at CES using our game:
It's great how much people are loving ElementL. It might be due to it's simplicity and fluidity, people just get it once they figure out the basic controls. That and it feels great to be chucking fire balls from your own hands! We'll probably pick this back up after Kaiju Panic.
More details of the OSVR here:
http://www.razerzone.com/osvr-hacker-dev-kit
Get the game here:
http://mechabit.itch.io/elementl
Leap Motion:
https://www.leapmotion.com/
Found a couple videos of people playing ElementL on youtube.
They are all fantastic, I especially like the one with the mother playing, virtual reality can bring the older generation into games!
Thanks to all the people making recordings, always love watching people's reactions to my games
http://blog.leapmotion.com/meet-the-3d-jam-top-20/
ElementL got voted into the top 20 of the 3D Jam entries
There are some really strong entries so I'm not holding my breath for a trip to indiecade but maybe it will pop up elsewhere... 😉
Here's some screenshots from our Leap motion jam entry
Left and right hands hold different powers, use the opposite element against enemies for massive damage!
Combine both hands for a special attack.
Here are some floating skulls in a spooky bamboo forest.
ElementL entry: http://itch.io/jam/leapmotion3djam/rate/13511
Here's the rest of the entries: http://itch.io/jam/leapmotion3djam#entries
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/18/oculus-rift-john-carmack-interview/
The one thing that we wanted to add but couldn't with the vr jam entry was to add positional tracking to the pecking motion but it seems the next version of the oculus rift devkit will have this feature so expect us to take advantage of it 😉
It sounds like the rift will be using an optical solution as opposed to sixaxis STEM magnetic based tracking which will be interesting to see.