Observatory: A VR Variety Pack Demo

This is the free demo for "Observatory: A VR Variety Pack." The demo contains one out of the four items in the pack: the music video for a song called Phantasmagoria, by a band called Icky Blossoms. This music video is a passive experience after you hit the start button, but the other three items in the pack are games that were created by the same development team.

Observatory is a four-pack of VR content for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and potentially other headsets later on. It includes three games and a music video - but we're halfway through a (hopefully) two-year development cycle, so all of the items in the pack are in different stages of development.

Our overall intent is to test out some different in-game uses of VR headsets by making small-but-comprehensive experiences with as much variation between them as we can:

• A musical trip through space
  
• A procedurally generated downhill racer
  
• A microscopic spacejet-horror game
  
• An animal-based island puzzler
  
• The pack also includes a (short) eBook which provides some backstory and shows how the four-pack's items relate to each other (and to our previous game, Not the Robots, and to our older Flash games) - if that's your kind of thing

Status: Complete

Vertigo: Mild

"Phantasmagoria" is a song by Icky Blossoms from their latest album Mask (Saddle Creek Records). We made the official music video by taking a description of a trippy space-traveling sequence that the band wrote and approximating it into a realtime cutscene. A 360-panorama version of Phantasmagoria will also be available for free, but we earnestly recommend the real-time version if you have a headset. The free demo for Observatory contains the music video in full!

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Status: Beta

Vertigo: Spicy

"Hamster Slide" is a downhill racing game where you generally try to spend as much time as possible in the air. A combination of in-air boosting and gliding lets you skip huge sections of tracks (like on a certain road that is also a rainbow) - as long as you can still hit all of the checkpoints. A new track is procedurally generated every day, and today's race always has live high scores with automatic replay sharing - so even though it's not live multiplayer, you can still see other real players racing by.

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Status: Prototype

Vertigo: Medium

"Antibody" is a spooky spacejet-style game about microscopic submarines acting as medicine. At the beginning of each round, the player acts as a scout by quietly sneaking around an infected area and identifying as many threats as possible. When the reinforcements arrive, the player is given more friendlies if they spotted more targets - and everyone gets into an asymmetrical dogfight.

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Status: Prototype

Vertigo: Mild

"The Island" is a puzzle game (you guessed it - on an island) that's focused on interactions with strange physics-based animals. It has two primary goals: First, to be a short-but-satisfying sequence of puzzles, and second, to be a pleasant setting for relaxation and sandboxing.

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We aren't designing games for motion controllers at this time, because while controller tracking in VR introduces cool new possibilities, we're more excited about the headset itself. So far we've been designing the games to work with a standard gamepad, but if you somehow have a headset and not a controller, the keyboard and mouse will also work. Everything in the pack will also work on a normal screen.