[Continuing the narrative from this earlier instalment]
You sit down on the single, wooden chair in the middle of the room, as the arbiters of heaven and hell insensitively debate what feels like every embarrassing moment in your lifetime. Your first kiss, the time you got dumped at high school formal, the time your work colleague spread a rumour about you and things got out of hand. The monochrome projector in the corner of the room kept replaying these moments, and all you can do in this surreal neon-clad room is sit there with your hands buried in your face. After what felt like half an hour… the verdict was in. Your actions in life had been deemed worthy enough to depart the world into the bliss of heaven, as you are escorted through a series of winding rooms up to the Heaven’s Bar. It is here, you are told, a final send-off celebration shall be held for you…
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” mindset at first, I quickly found myself running a Heaven vs Hell narrative through this gallery I eventually dubbed “Purgatory”.
This panorama comes from an earlier wing of the gallery, which I worked on as I began to unlock some new items; thus there being no particular rhyme or reason to the art. This area leads to an outdoor space dubbed the “Heaven’s Bar”, a grassy, peaceful field with glass walls, glass floor and (more random) artwork on the walls.
As with my earlier panorama from Occupy White Walls, 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.
