Heck yeah learning is what jams are all about. I personally like them because they kind of show me how much I know each time I start one. Like how much do I have to look up vs how much do I just know how to do because of previous games and jams.

Also I want to say from a jamming perspective it might be good to try to simplify things instead of go with realistic. One example is the elevator you could have just teleported the player up or down instantly which would reduce the waiting time, not as realistic but it is kind of nicer in games to just approximate some stuff. And for jamming purposes sometimes it's better to just get a very simple slightly working version before you try to make it nicer with like a moving elevator. If it had windows that let you look down into the area or something that would maybe give a reason for not just teleporting but overall just giving some ideas on that aspect.

I think I know what you mean with the player's movement, my game kind of has that issue, if you have teleport movement on or you are holding your gun when we teleport you into or out of town they get really janky. Because it's using velocity tracking it causes the gun to wiggle and bounce around as it tries to move from the old position to the new one and I tried fixing it but I couldn't get it to work. I could imagine with a flashlight that would produce some horrible visuals. I saw a few people recommending just parenting the object to your hand or to the xr rig when you grab it and then unparenting afterward but neither actually fixed the issue with teleporting. Wish I could figure that one out.

I know what you mean about the time sink on some of these things. I spent basically the whole time working on my gun mechanics and didn't really put a lot of effort into other parts of the game.

I agree the head flashlight had a somewhat satisfying feeling, I think in part due to the audio of it, good triaging/pivoting.

I'm not actually sure I ever got out of the tutorial haha, I'll definitely try it again when there's more fixes. Good job on getting the elevator to work though. During my run in the early version I was riding the elevator and I was able to stick my head through the wall to see that I was actually going up haha.

Edit: Also I think to make some things a little nicer like using the flashlight instead of using grip for select, you could turn on the option that let's you activate while hovering and then use activate instead of select for those actions, so you pull your trigger instead on your head lamp, or pull your trigger to activate elevator buttons.

Do you know what button that maps to on an index controller? Cause my menu button on my index controllers just bring up my steam menu.

Edit: I looked into it a little bit, I guess the oculus has different functionality mapped to the left and right menu buttons but on the index both are reserved for opening the steamvr menu. Not sure if there's anything that can be done about that. That's unfortunate. I decided to make my menu button one of the face buttons in my game, but I think in the future I might do a wrist attached virtual button to open the menu. I did in the past for a previous jam but I wanted the menu button to be accessible to all. Though it had the drawback of people accidentally pressing it.

Edit 2: Also did you end up making the buttons yourself? I feel like I did something similar before or I've used buttons similar to this. It's just a vague memory but it kind of seems like you rolled your own sockets/buttons and if so I think that's really cool. Like you are just taking the difference between the position of the button and where it should be and if it goes past a certain y index then it counts as pressed or something? And then just lerping it back to 0, 0, 0? I actually had to come up with something similar for my bullet system. I think if you lock it on the x and z axis then it will work a little better and you can further lock it to only moving a certain amount in the y axis so that it won't go too far down or too far up.

Thanks again and full credit to my team for that. I am not the aesthetics guy, that's Parker, but it feels like everyone else does more for the aesthetic than I do haha. Every little thing adds to it, font color choices, font choices, post processing (I've managed to keep them reeled in on this one), audio, effects, etc. I personally focus entirely on programming and tools programming, usually when there's a question of does this look good I'm like uhhhh yeah it looks the same as before or both look equally good so I'm glad to have people to work with that have a good eye for that. Thanks Parker, Rokugin, and LunaticLucas!

I see, that is unfortunate, I'm not a huge fan of "exclusives" haha, but I use OpenXR and XR Interaction Toolkit so it translates well for me. The funny thing was we weren't even planning on making a quest version of our game, so in a sense it was exclusive to PCVR, but one of my team members said just build it anyway and we'll see what it's like and by some miracle it works just as well even on a Quest 1.

Haha yes good eye the enemies are like twice the size of the players. I do think it kind of helps to actually hit the targets though a little bit. If they were smaller it might be even harder to hit them as they run away. I really wanted to add a huge enemy boss you could really let loose with fanning on because fanning against anything else doesn't work that well. Maybe I could have added aim assist for fanning or something using eye tracking.

Anyway thanks for playing. Admittedly the visuals were mostly attributable to Synty's excellent assets. I usually shy away from using them since a lot of people do but game jams are a good time to use them I think since it would take a long time to really put all that together, but our art team were able to take it and kind of make some of it our own, the hats and characters. We avoided using the Synty characters because that would really feel Synty assety. The guns, train, and a lot of the other objects were Synty. We do normally try to make more of our own assets for games but our lead 3d artist was having a baby shower for part of the jam so he was a little busy.

So glad we have someone focused on audio and general polish as well, custom music and some combining of other sound effects/foley work goes a long way to making it sound good. The default particle systems for guns for instance were just terribly large, you really couldn't see past them so it was fantastic to have someone make the guns even usable past the smoke screen.

Thanks for playing and I'm pretty sure I used one of your youtube videos as inspiration for how I set up my body socket system so thank you for that as well.

Okay having tried it while being able to move, that was pretty fun. I really liked hitting the enemies but I wish I wasn't locked to moving in a straight line so I could hit the other guys. The shuriken stuff still needs work but the bones are pretty fun. My shoulders are tired and it stops if you look down or backward which is unfortunate. I also had issues blocking still. Felt like 25% of the time I would block it but still be hit, it even made the blocked noise. Pretty fun though.

Also I'd definitely look up Onirogu to see how good throwing mechanics can feel as I mentioned before.

I played both the original and after jam editions and I couldn't get it to work it seemed. First off the menu was behind me at the start, this is probably just due to the fact that my play space is facing away from my PC. Anyway I liked the flashlight effect as did everyone else but I do think it could be more interesting to have it separated from the head and just in hand instead. I couldn't really figure out what to do, I took the elevator to the top room and it was empty, then to the bottom and walked out of the elevator half way up and discovered a random stump in the dark which was interesting. The smooth turn was a problem for me but I was happy that I could change it to snap turn in the settings. I didn't get much further after the stump I walked off the level. I decided to try out the after jam version and I found it to be more broken actually. I had smooth turn and snap turn on at the same time until I changed it in the settings which then made it snap turn only for my right hand, but my left hand was doing movement and snap turn so it was really hard to get anywhere. I ended up going to the elevator again and taking it up to the bottom and while it was going down I made it go to the top and when it got to the top it would never let me go anywhere else. Something that felt really good to me was the UI ray interactor smoothing, how did you do that? It felt really good.

Aesthetically your game is pleasing, I like the style and the menu being a like old TV is cool, but I couldn't get past the basic locomotion issues and I couldn't get the game started I guess. I did notice that while falling down out of the level I saw there was another way to go inside the elevator. I'm also a bit confused about the difference between ground floor and bottom floor but I guess bottom would be lower than ground.

Ohhhh, I'm going to play it again lol. That sounds amazing.

Any chance of a PCVR release after the jam?

Some people can definitely use smooth turn but for me it has always caused a decent amount of motion sickness. I can move smoothly but as soon as I start rotating it is a problem for me sadly. I really want to be able to get immersed but unfortunately I gotta stick with the snap turn.

Yeah I dunno why it doesn't work for me. I am on PCVR, Valve Index, RTX 3090TI, i7-9700K, and 32 GB of RAM at 4000 Mhz.

Any chance of a PCVR release after the jam?

I really don't like smooth turn. Having locomotion options I feel is a must. That said the hands in this one felt pretty good. The buttons and all the other interactions were kind of interesting but also didn't really work all that well. There were several instances where the buttons would get stuck on other things which like I said was rather interesting but it did make the game harder to play. I feel like the overall concept was interesting but at the end of the day it did just kind of feel like a chore simulator. At first I couldn't get the boxes to grab the items, they kept falling through the box and I got really confused. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to close them. Then when I put the boxed item on the launch tube it wouldn't let me launch because I got the color wrong, there are definitely two purples so that was super confusing as well. I also was able to grab the box as it was being launched which caused me all kinds of issues. One such issue is I tried to put the next item in the same box, you know recycle, reduce, reuse and the item fell down into the tube but I couldn't range grab it with the ray interactor so I bent down to pick it up and in doing so I got myself stuck in the tube, forever more. There's a lot of neat little interactions like the button and slot mechanics. I do feel like having 3 launch tubes was unnecessary, felt like the room layout could have been more to one side because that rotation felt horrible, I know it's a vr game so you can make use of the space but it feels like if there was just one tube you could have fit it all on one longer table, or just a big U shaped table, since turning around is annoying with smooth turn and also to turn in real life is tedious as you have to keep spinning back and forth.

I don't like smooth turning, the smooth movement felt off too because it uses acceleration, those are both likely due to the usage of Hurricane VR and Hexabody, so I'm not sure I can exactly fault you on that. The concept was interesting but the implementation didn't feel great since I had to carry around an extra magazine with me and when I ran out of ammo had to go walk back out and pick up a new mag or gun off the table. Body sockets would be nice so I could hold extra magazines with me and or extra weapons. The enemies felt like they didn't die in one shot to the head sometimes which was a little annoying and also not knowing how much health I had wasn't awesome. The angle at which you could grab things felt off as well as the aiming angle, I had to really tilt my hand forward to be able to look down sights. The physics stuff was neat and the fact that I could do things like shoot enemies through the crack in the door. Though they could seemingly shoot me through closed doors. It did churn my stomach a bit but I think that was mostly the smooth turn. Also the zones on the right stick overlap a bit so the ducking standing up and turning would often overlap for me which was slightly annoying, might be an index issue but you can set dead zones between the up down left and right to kind of smooth that a bit.

Also I like testing games so I immediately got myself stuck on the menu by taking the gun and throwing into the sky after playing around with the zero G element. It would be nice to have a reset gun option or button or something on that menu screen at least or make an invisible cage so people can't yeet the gun too far away. So I had to reopen the game.

Thanks for playing.

We have definitely already started doing some polish on it but we're going to wait until the judging is over to upload them, got things like particle effects and animations on enemy death and so on that have been listed but anything you got we want to hear.

The starting each round with empty guns was not even a thing I considered, I usually reload them myself after I am done shooting but that's a good suggestion. I think the way I think about them is sort of realistic, if they had no ammo in them the last time you holstered them why would it magically change in the next round, they continue to exist as they have but it is a game and that would be kind of nice. Something that wasn't mentioned is there's two reload methods, mashing the reload button and just holding it down. personally I like the tactility of mashing the button per round reloaded but for those who can't or don't want to do that you can always hold it down.

The menu definitely helps pull a game together, it's hard enough getting a fully working game but getting one with a menu with actually meaningful options is a whole other story haha. It definitely took some work on that.

PCVR, the specific instance was after I microwaved the food and I took it out of the microwave I turned around and walked across the kitchen, I was like mission accomplished and then it was like, do the flight path! I was already by the baby and completely turned around and I was like oh man now I have to walk back over there, but I should have known.

Ah I didn't know I could run because I wasn't able to move at all. I tried all the buttons, couldn't figure out what to do I was basically just standing there blocking enemies and waiting for my shurikens to come up.

It's likely due in part to how I have my VR space set up personally. I have my chair and desk facing the opposite direction of the direction of the VR space. I did kind of like wandering around inside the town.

Well I'm definitely going to try it out.

As for the flying sequence stuff I don't know why but it wasn't triggering quickly enough or something so I would end up walking across the room and then it would set up the sequence and tell me about it and I was like oh I should have known at this point lol it's only happened like 3 other times so that's partially on me, but it definitely didn't seem to be happening right away.

I was about to download and play but it says it was uploaded today and that's not really in the spirit of the jam to play an updated version. Do you have the version you uploaded originally?

The menu was backwards from my plays pace and I couldn't rotate while in the menu so I had to physically turn around to start the game and then when I spawned I was backwards again and had to flip around. I like testing the limits of games so the first thing I did was walk off the ship and wander around the town which in it of itself was kind of interesting. My right hand was like rotated all wrong which was pretty weird. Once I quit and restarted the game since I had no way back up I was able to start the thing. The information bubbles playing audio over each other and the stork talking all at the same time was hard to tell what was going on and the controlling the ships turning was funky, it felt like the rudder itself kept pushing me. Throwing babies was... pretty funny. The ship did turn off while I was trying to throw the babies into the town and it must have flown out of bounds because an invisible wall pushed me off the ship. Then as the ship flew off into the sunset I saw all the babies getting dragged along with it which was pretty funny too. Throwing with an Index unfortunately kind of sucks, I know it can be tweaked with bindings but it just didn't work all too well for me. I was able to yeet some of them pretty good. Not being able to reset was unfortunate and honestly doing this with friends would have been a bit easier since someone could steer, someone could control speed and others could chuck babies or even just drop them if the flight path was good.

I was not able to play it as it lagged horribly. I'm not sure what would cause that because I have a fairly beefy computer. I won't be rating it because I would not be able to provide fair judgement.

I really disliked the reversed controls. Speaking even from using a regular controller generally left thumbstick controls movement and right thumbstick controls vision, and in a VR game you control your actual view so generally it's right stick controls rotation. The concept was really great and imaginative. I'm not sure about the scale on this one because I felt like a giant. I don't think I should have been able to see over the fridge. I had to do a lot of bending over to reach things which would push me away from places I was supposed to reach. The shooting stuff was pretty fun and funny. Again the concept was really great and I haven't seen anything like it. Sound effects were alright but kind of loud and some didn't loop perfectly so it made the audio a little grating. I also found that if you keep feeding the baby over and over at the end it plays a ton of stacked up audio. Also after the "dream sequence" ends switching to smooth rotation is a terrible idea. Definitely got a little motion sick from it. I had a very hard time completing some of the flying stuff and I was also annoyed when I walked across the room for it to then trigger another flying thing which started back where I was so there may some timing issues there. Maybe the scale issue was because I started off seated. I feel like that might be the case for another game I played as well but maybe not. There was some tiny moments of jank but nothing game breaking like accidentally grabbing the lid instead of the bottle and when I was pouring coffee it was kind of flipping out.

Definitely a little confusing at first since I couldn't seem to move while the menu was up and I was worried I wouldn't be able to move around the room. The instructions might be better up on the wall where you start at near the menu if you are going to lock people in like that. Throwing felt really off for some reason like my hands would freeze often when throwing stuff. Not sure if the extra stuff was just there to be in the way while you sorted mail. The space felt kind of liminal and I liked that. I do think large mail intake trays might have been a little easier to work with. Being able to change hands and bodies was pretty cool. I like that there was an I quit button that straight up closes the game. Good job including multiple locomotion styles but I do think it would be better to have it start with teleport because you would have to smoothly walk over to the table to find out you can switch it, might be better as an option in the menu. The reason I say that is some people can't handle smooth movement or they get really sick and it basically limits anyone like that from finding out teleport was even an option. The table seemed tiny and it made me really confused about the scale of the world and if I was the right size or not.

Hey I said I'd try this out but I have an Index so I guess I'm out. I won't be rating as it would not be a fair judgement. Sorry, if you make a PCVR version of your next game I'll be able to try.

When I did the tutorial it seemed like I got stuck there so I had to quit the game and restart it after the shuriken throwing part. In the actual game I died when I was pretty sure I blocked the attack. Overall the concept was cool, I liked switching between the two weapons based on grip style. I didn't like shuriken cooldown and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be moving or anything. After I ran out of shurikens I was just standing around blocking attacks from the enemies until one hit me through my guard. I don't think the throwing mechanic felt that good to use. I think for a good example of a fantastic throwing mechanic one could look at a VR Jam entry from a while ago called Onirogu, it was fantastic and felt great to throw stuff. This sometimes would double throw on the same target and sometimes not throw at all.

I could not stomach this game's movement. The smooth turn is probably the worst part honestly. The grappling was fine and jumping was okay. I honestly wasn't sure what I was even really supposed to be doing. The throwing did not feel satisfying and the rocket booster thing was very small and having a grapple cooldown didn't feel great either. The styling definitely felt off from what the title conveyed. I definitely wanted to explore the space but I could not handle it.

Hey I said I would try this out since you tried mine out but I have an Index so I guess I won't be able to sorry. I won't be rating it since I wouldn't be a fair judge.

I've taken your feedback into account on our post game jam polish pass and I made it so you can put the holsters wherever you want, shoulders, chest, floating in front of you. I forgot to add the ability to adjust where the body is, but I'll go ahead and move it back a little bit so when you look down you aren't looking right at it. I'll try to get it to follow your virtual neck more so that it is out of the way. And maybe I'll add in a body adjustment just to be sure.

Technically the body was directly under the head which means when you look down it doesn't move back like it would if it were attached to your neck. So that's what I hope to fix with that change.

Hope you'll try it again after the jam.

Yeah as I may have mentioned in another comment to someone else, I am definitely all about playing with my friends and if I am making something I can't play with my friends it's not as fun.

Thanks for playing!

We thought about putting a yeehaw in here or there for where they were spawning from but ended up not doing that. That's a great idea though. 

Unfortunately we can't take full credit for the visuals as a lot of it was asset based from Synty however our artist was having a baby shower and was a little busy for some of the jam. He was able to put together some stuff and wants to go back and redo some of the visuals after the jam to make it more ours.

As for the reloading not sure I can say much there other than practice, practice, practice!

Thanks for the review.

Multiplayer games are what we do basically, I want to make games I can play with my friends so that's pretty much all I end up making, for better or for worse haha. Thanks for playing.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll be sure to try out your game.

Everything my brother said and we'll be doing a polish pass and updating the game after the jam ends so you can look forward to that. I am hoping to add some customizability to the locations of your holsters and body as well as your gun holding angle so that you can adjust it to whatever your situation.

That is correct the hats don't have any real effect other than making you feel like a cowboy or cowgirl. Haha. Should have mentioned somewhere you can shoot them to make them fly to you. I didn't want to go for a traditional kind of ray grab that you see in a lot of games, this is more akin to like half life alyx I guess but the interaction is you shoot it to make it fly to you.

Anyway I hope you had fun and when we update it maybe you'll give it another go and it will be smoother. Regardless we'll be trying to take this stuff into consideration going forward into other games and game jams.

Thanks

The reason for that is that it works like a real revolver. If there are empty shells in between shots and you pull the trigger on an empty shell it won't fire.  

Yeah we originally had the guns a little closer to the player and lower but we wanted to make sure everyone would be able to reach them. It would be better if they were configurable or something perhaps.

And yep about the standing and shooting, we talked about adding in obstacles to duck under like you see in some movies and other games but we did kind of want it to be playable sitting down.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the kind words. We were throwing around the idea of putting in a quick draw VS mode for the heck of it but with like 3 hours left it felt like maybe something for later so maybe.

 We generally tend to go back into our jam games and clean them up with feedback we got during the jam to just really make them more presentable.

I will definitely check your game out. Thanks.

Gotta have the hats! My favorite part is how you pick them up. I'd didn't want to do the standard line interactor to grab stuff and figured if you shot it to you that would be cool and it is incredibly satisfying.
I also wanted to add a little shop in the town where you could unlock the various hats, but we didn't get around to it in the time we had.