Category: The Gallery

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GDC 2017: First Hands-On Preview With The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone

GDC 2017: First Hands-On Preview With The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone

My demo for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone ended the exact same way Episode 1 ended for me: with my mouth open, staring up at the sky. In the first episode, you’re ascending into what can only be described as a portal of some kind as The Watcher, a mysterious and ominous character, talks to you about what’s coming next just before the credits roll. The ending of my Episode 2 demo was much more visually arresting.

At GDC 2017, Cloudhead Games allowed me to have the first hands-on preview of the upcoming sequel to their 2016 hit VR adventure title, The Gallery: Episode 1 – The Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10]. After over $1 million in revenue and winning our award for Best VR Game Narrative of 2016, Episode 2 is picking up right where it left off.

The demo began with me standing in front of a large, circular door. I reached out with my right hand, which was laden with an ornate, clearly alien gauntlet — the same one you receive at the end of Episode 1. A crystal reacts to the glowing part of the gauntlet, triggering a mechanism that allows me to unlock the door by moving my hand forward.

From there, I’m treated to a room that I am later told will serve as the hub of the adventure. The Gallery: Episode 2 is designed as a longer journey (around 6 hours) rife with exploration. Instead of following a mostly linear path like the first game, this time you’re free to roam between different areas, unlocking secrets as you go.

For starters, this room contained plenty of secrets. In front of me was a shining pad on the ground that, when stepped upon, created a cascading effect of stones around me to spawn what looked like a topographical map. My guess is that I can use this hub portal to fast travel in the future.

To my left and right were chests that had floating crystals that I could once again activate with my right hand. This time, each of them spawned a special puzzle that needed to be solved very carefully. My hands disappeared and my right hand movements were now represented by only the crystal, which I had to slowly move through a tube.

Inside the tube I saw red obstacles that were moving around to hinder my progress. I had to carefully move the crystals through the tubes without touching the insides of the tube themselves. It sounds confusing, but you can see a glimpse of them in the teaser above.

 

After my demo of The Gallery: Episode 2 I spoke with the team at Cloudhead and they emphasized how small of a slice this demo was of the full game. I didn’t get to explore the greater world, I only saw one other character — a hologram of a woman exploring the room (could it be your missing sister?) and poked around with a few puzzles.

But that being said, what I did see got me very excited. This strange new alien world of Ember is coming to life in wondrous detail and I’m aching to dive back into this universe. The biggest issue with Episode 1 was the linearity and brevity; both of those elements seem to be improved, if just a bit, this time around.

The demo ended with a giant stone-like creature emerging from the smoke and shadows, standing tall above the tower I was inside, and reaching down with his enormous hand towards me as I stood there, mouth agape, looking upwards just as last time.

We don’t have an exact release date for The Gallery: Episode 2, but it is slated for Spring 2017, which means within just a couple of months. Stay tuned at UploadVR for more coverage on the game as we get closer to release.

The Gallery Episode 2 will release simultaneously for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch this Spring. Cloudhead is also working on bringing both existing and all future episodes to PlayStation VR (PSVR) with no timeframe for release.

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Motion Capture Acting Within VR? Cloudhead Games Explains In Latest Dev Diary

Motion capture for TV, film and videogame projects is not a new technology, and by this point you will have no doubt seen many a person clad in black with what look like ping pong balls attached to them. In the same vein you’ll have likely seen people using facial recognition technology, and actors performing their roles with a face full of blue dots to record the facial movements.

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone

For virtual reality (VR) it all becomes a little bit more tricky. However, unlike standard motion capture it also provides an additional and intriguing solution: What if the actor was able to perform their roles as a character within the digital space itself? It’s something that Cloudhead Games are already doing as they discuss the process in their latest behind the scenes video discussing work on the next title in their VR videogame series The Gallery.

In the video representatives from the studio discuss how the actors are able to react to the digital environment. How, thanks to what is essentially an in-VR teleprompter, they are able to make changes to the script “on the fly”. How it all affects VR audio and how it affects the composition and the way a scene is acted at all.

“[The actors] actually end up acting more like theatre actors, because the player could be far away.” Producer and Audio Director Joel Green explains at one point. “Anybody, no matter where they are, is still going to get the empotional effect of the scene.”

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is due out 2017 and is the sequel to 2016’s The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed. You can read VRFocus‘ review of the latter here.

VRFocus will bring you more updates on The Gallery series as they are made available.

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Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10] was one of our favorite VR games in 2016. In fact, it even took home the honors of being named the Best Narrative of the year. We know that Episode 2 will be called Heart of the Emberstone and the currently running series of developer diary videos are poised to divulge additional information over time. But as of now, we didn’t know much about the episode itself and what it’s all about — that is, until now.

Thanks to the second entry in the developer diary series, Cloudhead Games has peeled back a few of the layers on the strange new alien world that players are set to explore. At the end of Call of the Starseed, things end as players don a strange gauntlet on their hand and emerge through what appears to be a portal, or spaceship of some kind. It’s an epic cliffhanger. Watch the latest diary below:

We’ve spoken to Cloudhead previously about how they’re building The Gallery into an epic  sci-fi property remniscent of the IPs that inspired it and that tradition is continuing in Episode 2. Denny Unger, CEO and Creative Director at Cloudhead, specially cites The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as heavy inspirations.

“When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed,” explains Mike Wilson, Narrative Director.

Then Jonathan Hackett, Art Lead on the project, continues by detailing that, “When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed.”

Unfortunately we still know only precious little about the world itself, but the art work shown in the video and the mentions of creatures such as the pesky Wizgogs are enough to sufficiently pique our interest.

“One of the things that sets Heart of the Emberstone apart is that we’ve designed a kind of open world game flow in VR,” says Unger. “It might be the first time in VR that anyone’s attacked it from this kind of perspective…it’s a completely different ‘game feel’ than Episode 1.”

We still don’t know a release date for Episode 2, but hopefully the ramp up of behind-the-scenes footage and dev diaries is pointing to sooner rather than later.

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