Loved the first two so I'm curious if any more are coming or has the series died a sad death.

Dear Developer, I know you are against artificial locomotion because it causes motion sickness but now that VR has been a commercial release for a while a lot of us have adapted to using it. We got our VR legs as you would say. Is it possible you could add it in rest of the episodes and possible retro fit the Call of the Star Seed with it. It works really well in games like Dead Effect, Serious Sam and Onward. There is nothing more that breaks the immersion in game then running into your play space barrier when moving around in room scale, especially with a smaller play space.

I read that an update for HTC Vive version was due at same time as oculus release. Has this update dropped yet?

Love the game by the way. Bring on ep 2.

Side note, getting horrible jitter on high settings when looking at fuse puzzle. I7 3770k, gtx1070 and 16gb ram.

It’s 1762, and Mike arrives at the studio wearing a lacey bonnet. The team gathers and sits together in a shape sharing some semblance to a circle, the soft grass tickling our unshaven legs, and we begin to churn. We churn, and we churn, until a thick embryo of fat separates from the cream. If it’s too milky, Div changes a variable. If we don’t churn fast enough, Dan starts to remove his clothes. I’m in the back, beginning to develop heatstroke.

Prototyping is laborious, and we’ve been churning out designs for Episode 2 day in and day out. Last month was the hottest on record for Vancouver Island (as it was for most places), and when the studio thermostat is reading temps almost as high as an R9 290, it really puts things into perspective.

Alright, not that hot—but still.

Our summer has been spread thin between supporting Episode 1 with a massive performance update, plotting the 1.5 content update, porting Episode 1 to the Oculus Touch, designing Episode 2 with a suite of new knowledge and ideas, and working on a few other secrets. Just as our fathers before us, and our fathers’ mothers before them, we continue to churn.

Call of the Starseed

In case you missed it, Call of the Starseed is now included with every HTC Vive purchase, along with Tilt Brush and Zombie Training Simulator. That means that everyone who buys a new Vive will get Call of the Starseed bundled for free, and our adventure will be many players’ first step into virtual reality.

Needless to say, this is an incredible honour. This dream of Virtual Reality has consumed our lives for the better half of five years, and now here we are, the proverbial Duck Hunt of VR. This is an enormous milestone for our team, essentially guaranteeing that every future Vive owner (while supplies last™) will get to play the game that we’ve poured our hearts and lives into.

It means that our head-first dive into the murky waters of an unknown tech has found fruition. There’s no bigger validation than knowing that the remarkable people at HTC, Vive, and Valve—the developers and innovators who have shaped our passions and our careers—want to show us off. And to be included with the wonderful people at Acceleroto and Google is simply humbling.

As new players continue to join our adventure, we will continue to support Episode 1 with a new 1.5 content update which we’re aiming to release shortly before…

Oculus Touch

The Oculus version of The Gallery: Call of the Starseed will be released through Oculus Home at the launch of the Touch later this year, and will require the Touch to play. Just like the Vive version, interaction is an imperative part of our experience; you’ll need those high-fidelity Touch motion controllers so that you can become immersed first-hand (pun intended).

Because Oculus does not yet natively support room-scale, the Oculus port is not an OpenVR remap of the version out today on the Steam store. Interactions and locomotion will need to support a 180° standing mode, so we’ve reconsidered how many of these systems will work, and will talk more about our new solutions closer to launch.

For Oculus players who do set up their Touch to work in room-scale, we will be offering room-scale support on our end. This means that if you choose to set your Touch up that way, you will be able to play The Gallery with the Oculus Touch in room-scale, just as you would on the Vive. Room-scale continues to be an important element of VR to us, and we’re happy to be able to support this feature and bring a closer parity between the Vive and Touch experiences of The Gallery.

Heart of the Emberstone

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is currently deep in production. For the development of Emberstone, and all subsequent episodes, we’re treating them as mini sequels. That means new areas to explore, new characters, new puzzles, new mechanics, and new iterations to all existing mechanics.

Where Starseed was a great introduction to VR, Emberstone will take everything we learned during development and take it one step further. We’re taking the gloves off, so to speak. We’re also taking the socks off. And, yes, we’re taking the toques off.

Our inclusion in the new content bundle and the upcoming release of Episode 1 for Oculus Touch means that more and more new players will continue to experience The Gallery throughout the year. This means we’ll have a huge new audience to impress with Episode 2, and we’re excited to deliver the best possible experience to all of our fans. We’re not ready to share a release date yet, so for now it’s When It’s Ready™.

A few other secrets

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Next month

We’ve got some more stuff we’re excited to start sharing next month, including some new faces to Cloudhead, and the first in a new developer video series. For now, we just wanted to tell you as much as we can about what we’re working on before going back to the churning. If you like to keep a close eye on what we’re doing, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also check out our Instagram where we post photos and videos from inside the studio—we’ll do a code giveaway to followers once we break 500, so hit us up if you’re into free games.

• Improved performance on the beach
• Flattened out beach walking planes (where possible)
• Reconfigured beach balcony to avoid unnecessary height variations
• Rotational/Positional interactions refined
• Fixed: Circuit board parts disappearing in backpack, blocking progress
• Fixed: Held lantern detaches violently/disappears on blink
• Fixed: Beacon cage door remains locked after completing Lab puzzle. We’ve had a lot of trouble reproducing this on our end, but we believe it is now fixed. Please let us know if you run into this again.

This patch contains a number of changes to the beach that attempt to reduce the height changes that are causing discomfort for some. Please note that it doesn’t flatten out all of the vertical variation in the game, because that would be impossible without completely redesigning the environments. We have taken the feedback to heart though, and will be working on an optional system for EP2 (which will likely also be rolled back into EP1) that would attempt to fix the issue on a deeper level.

Thanks to all our wonderful fans for the feedback since launch. We are listening and channeling it directly into making EP2 a better game in every way. We’re also planning on more regular patching now that this one is out the door, so if you’re still experiencing issues, rest assured that we’re working on them.

Thank you so much for your support. We’re thrilled to be on this crazy journey with all of you, and so stoked that you like this weird world we’re creating. Call of the Starseed took you down the rabbit hole. Heart of the Emberstone will show you just how deep it goes...

The Cloudhead Team

Hi there, I backed the gallery a long, long time ago, really good to see it getting ready for launch.

Yesterday, I get a mail asking my to fill out the response survey. Problem is it's asking me to choose if I have an oculus or a vive.

I don't actually have either preordered. I'm torn because I want motion tracking and room scale, but like rifts form factor and thing touch looks way better than the clunky wands. I want to wait until we know more about it, or more reviews come in before I decide, and am happy to slum it in my dk2 till then.

Is it possib;e to just leave the form unsubmitted? How long is resonable to do so? A few days? Weeks? Months?