While big virtual reality (VR) developers are delivering on the dreams we’ve long talked about, some of the most intriguing ideas for experiences are born from development jams. The unique environments that these events create encourages teams to think outside of HMD and create innovative mechanics and out there experiences. A perfect example of this was seen last weekend at a small HTC Vive Jam in Stockholm, Sweden. A group of friends gathered to experiment with SteamVR, it’s position-tracked controllers and Room Scale user-tracking.
Below is a summary of the event from one of its participants, Julie Heyde. VR fans will know Heyde from her work with VR projects such as Ragnarok VR as well as organising other events such as the Shayla Games VR jam in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read on as she takes you through the results of the 20+ developer jam:
A small gathering of developers decided to throw a Vive Jam in Stockholm this past weekend.
Koshi/Simplygon, Max/Filimundus and Julie/Bandello decided to organise a little Vive Jam for a few friends in Stockholm and time it around their friend Olga’s birthday party. Filimundus kindly hosted the jammers in their offices and Simplygon provided some food and refreshments. Koshi and Julie are longterm friends, and Julie and Max met during Shayla Games where Max was part of both the winning game jam team AND the winning rubber dinghy race team. Olga had to postpone her party, but did come over to play Bandello’s VRLympix™ #SelfieTennis on Saturday and decided to let out some aggressions on one of the NPCs.
The pop-up event amounted to some 20 jammers+visitors and it had 3 Vive set-ups in total brought to the jam by Julie Heyde and Joachim Holmér (the wizard behind Shader Forge).
Some of the games developed during the weekend are:
Wizard Ruckus: Joachim Holmér, Joachim Ante + ReJ. Joachim Holmer also showed the highly anticipated Budget Cuts to a few of the jammers (still so very secret, so no footage of that for you).
World of Water: Daniel Nyberg, Daniel Kihlgren Kallander, Joel Zakrisson + Robert Johnson (Team Vobling). World of Water is inspired by the 1995 movie Waterworld. You take on the role of the Mariner, sailing your trimaran sailing boat between the Atolls.
Team Simplygon worked on a very secret demo for GDC.
Max & Julie spent most of their time setting up the hardware and infrastructure….and making coffee, but did almost manage to finish a game deriving from Max’ wish for a VR shower and Julie’s fear of German FKK beaches…..FKK Stimulator will be available to the public later this year.
Julie demoed the current games in the VRLympix™ series and is still recovering from smashing into the wall in the Filimundus office during #RaceToTheEast when trying to beat the highscore – she started practising almost a month ago, so you would assume she had gotten better at avoiding injuries by now.
Two of her Bandello teammates, Horatiu & Milan, spent their weekend at Exile Game Jam and made Balloominous™, a meditative experience about flying a balloon and collecting floating luminous things. The Bandello team will show this and the other VRLympix™ games during Slush in Helsinki this week.
-END-
The post VR Devs Gather in Stockholm for HTC Vive Jam, Here’s What Came of It appeared first on VRFocus.
