Today marks the official launch of the HTC Vive, and a strong library of games and experiences to go with it. One game in particular, The Gallery: Call of the Starseed, stands out with both its beauty and ambition. Inspired by ’80s fantasy movies, not only is The Gallery a puzzle adventure game that is designed to take advantage of full-room motion tracking, but developer Cloudhead Games intends to make it an episodic series. That makes Call of the Starseed the start of an ongoing virtual reality adventure, filled with mystery.
Mike Wilson, narrative director at Cloudhead Games, talked to [a]listdaily about bringing fantasy to life using the HTC Vive (other VR platforms will eventually be supported), traveling to all-new worlds, and always preparing for what the future might hold for The Gallery.
What is The Gallery: Call of the Starseed about?
The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is a fantasy adventure VR game that lets you escape to another world and become a hero in search of your lost sister. Call of the Starseed is full of intricate details, clever puzzles, quirky characters and mystery. Along the way, you will be assisted by a helpful yet unhinged Professor who may harbor ulterior motives of his own. You will search for your sister, Elsie, and this journey will lead you to a cosmic machine which wields incredible power and will test your will against the forces of a shadowy figure who resides within it. The Gallery is a game, yes, but it is also an experience.
The Gallery is said to be inspired by dark ’80s fantasy films. What are some of the biggest influences, and how did they impact the story?
We wanted to create an edgy, dark experience, all the while assuring the player that they will always be safe, a trait we loved in ’80s fantasy films. As a team, we all love movies such as The Goonies and the beloved Labyrinth. They’re scary films, but at the same time, tender and reassuring. That reassurance is what we want the player to feel while playing The Gallery. As the story arc progresses, you will get a sense of this push and pull; the give and take between skirting the edge of danger, and reassurance. The feeling of nostalgia that we try to evoke also serves to make you feel at home in a very unfamiliar environment.
What convinced you to develop the game for HTC Vive at launch?
We were developing for the Vive before it was even called the Vive—using surrogate motion-control technology and aiming for a standing VR experience. Our view of VR is that, at its best, it can transport you from your living room to another place. It can truly be other-worldly. Virtual reality can transport you to a magical place, that you have (until now) only seen in your imagination. To achieve this transportative effect, we believe that the more realistic movement and input the player has, the better.
In what ways does full-room motion tracking play into the experience?
Lighthouse tracking allows the player to truly explore a new space. That physicality transcends a purely seated experience and convinces your brain that you are somewhere special. You see something that interests you? Walk over to that object, pick it up, examine it, use that item and then discard it by dropping it. These actions are so human and fundamental that it takes very little to decipher between your intent and your actions. Meaning, there is no longer an abstract action in between your desires and your actions in room scale; you simply behave like a human would in that space. Beyond this innate ability to interact with the game world, lighthouse tracking allows for a fidelity that is currently unmatched, and that precise tracking is directly tied to the deepest levels of immersion possible in VR.
Why was The Gallery created as an episodic game? How does the format enhance the experience?
The Gallery was turned into an episodic release for a few reasons: one, episodic releases allow us to create a denser storyline. We are counting on the player to explore as much as they would like to discover the narrative in The Gallery. We want to cut up these chunks of exploration as to not fatigue the player.
Two, it gave us the time to really nail the detail in the story and in the art. Look anywhere around you in The Gallery, and you’ll see layers of detail that silently pull you further into the fantasy. Virtual reality simply requires more development time than a normal release.
Three, we are now able to create a product that evolves with the medium. We will learn from what the audiences responded to in previous episodes, and what other experiences are bringing to the table. We can then use this hindsight to build our future episodes into more engaging, technologically advanced, experiences that we would not have been privy to if we were a single-release game. To put it bluntly, The Gallery aims to be the latest and greatest in VR tech, and to do that, we need a tighter dev cycle.
How do you promote a game that is both episodic and made for an emerging technology like VR?
The same way you would with any other episodic game: you make the experience worth coming back to. We will prove, with each episode of The Gallery, that we are not settling for what we have accomplished, but are constantly striving for the next-best experience.
What has been the most important thing to keep in mind while developing and promoting The Gallery?
The newness of the medium. There’s a lot that’s going on for a user in VR, and right now the landscape is a totally foreign frontier. The VR landscape can be a bit overwhelming, with so many tech choices, and ideas of what VR should mean to the consumer. The Gallery was intentionally designed to just let users explore at their own pace, and to take in the experience at their individual comfort level. Most players come out of The Gallery with this “VR-shock” look on their face—a somewhat dazed, somewhat confused look which expresses so perfectly what we wanted them to feel. ‘Where did I just go?’—that look is what we love to see.
