You wake up on a cold, inorganic floor. Opening your eyes for the briefest of moments, they are harshly forced shut by the neon lights bouncing off every wall. Over the next few minutes, your eyes adjust, and you find yourself in a mysterious courtroom setting – one with a blue sign stating “heaven” and the other a red sign stating “hell”.
You are now dead.
You had a somewhat average life. You didn’t do anything particularly good for anyone but at the same time didn’t do more than toe the line when it came to doing wrong. Unfortunately for you, due to overcrowding, living typically no longer grants you immediate entry to the pearly white gates of heaven. It is here, in this courtroom, where your entire life will be put on display, questioned, and the arbiters of heaven and hell determine who should get your soul.
The video game Occupy White Walls is all about building your ideal gallery, and sharing it with the online community. However, it also offers a lot of flexibility with its building tools, allowing you to build impressive rooms which feature no paintings themselves. While I had initially gone with a simple “lets playtest and not care much about appearances” look at first, I quickly had a Heaven vs Hell narrative running through this gallery I eventually dubbed “Purgatory”. Above, is a 360-degree panorama of a room important to my narrative, where after spending some time exploring in the Purgatory “waiting room”, those who have lived average lives are called forward for a trial to make a case for why they deserve to go to heaven.
This is my first time making an in-game panorama as well, I think it came out great! This made use of NVIDIA’s Ansel tool which provides many valuable tools to take beautiful, high-resolution in-game photographs well beyond your screen resolution.
Take That (In-Game) Snap Daily Photo is an off-shoot of the Take That (In-Game) Snap article series, in which the first article focusing on Final Fantasy XIV was recently published. This looks at, celebrates and critiques how video game developers have implemented professional photography-like systems into their games. It will cover how the systems handle, just how accessible they are and, where applicable, how a modding community might be making these tools even better. With this Daily Photo spin-off series, I will be sharing individual photos from the games either covered or soon-to-be-covered.
