... the "cardboard thing" is VR.

The real question is, will we ever get the NerveGear?

Full disclosure: I wrote none of Out of Ammo personally.  I did work on some very very early experimental setup work with the Vive VR but I don't even think any of that stuff is in OoA.

It uses Unreal Engine 4, written completely using Blueprints. 

IMO the hardest challenges are that many things just don't work in VR - player motion chief of all.  There are also a tonne of technical restrictions: you have to get 90fps to avoid noticeable dropped frames/stuttering as you turn your head.  Also since just doing VR takes so much work, there's not a lot of the nice features we have in modern games that you can use - post processing is prohibitive.  Which I think is why most VR games don't look all that flash - it's really only seeing them in VR that makes them come to life.

We tried a bunch of experiments with different game concepts before we settled on Out of Ammo - lots of things we thought might work proved to be less fun that we'd imagined.  It's kinda like being in a technical wild west - you just don't know what's going to be successful and what will not.

I had work at another start up in Dunedin called Clocktower Games, who renamed themselves Aero.  They had a series of games called Casebook1 & 2.  There were more planned, but in the way of start-ups, we ran out of cash (we outsourced some work to a third party who were so incompetent and so slow that they drained all our cash).   I also worked at a company called Virtual Spectator who were doing OpenGL based 3D visualisation for sports events (in my case, the World Rally Champs).  And I also did some educational games (Java applets) in a contract for the NZ department of education.

I had personally given up on ever working in games again. Honestly, Clocktower closing down was a real body blow for me and I had decided to just let it go (I have a family and a mortgage!)  However, when I discovered that Dean Hall was opening up a studio in Dunedin I figured that I would hate myself if I didn't apply.  Luckily for me, Dean was looking for someone with a bit of software engineering experience to help add I guess an "old head" while he was busy working in London.  So, how I got the job: I sent them an email, CV and just talked about how games were my passion.  I feel very lucky.  This is still hard work, but if I compare hard work to make a web site for wankers vs hard work to make games with cool people, it's a no brainer, right? =)

I'd love to do more gamedev in Java, I just don't want to have to make all the middlewear you can get off the shelf for C++ or C# (that said, I hate Unity!)

What was it like.

Wow, that's... really kinda useless. Spot on summary.