A past relationship becomes a labyrinth of interior worlds where sci-fi, self-help, and messy teenage yearning collide. Explore a multi-dimensional grid of feelings and memory, experiment with relational cause and effect, or maybe even find closure in a darkly comedic multiverse of exes and reflections. A queer adventure for players of all persuasions
Layered, specific and universal story of love and heartbreak
Ambitious exploration of interactive virtual beings via emerging capture technology
Gestural “emotional maneuvers” provide expressive gameplay
Unique and talented team with expertise in performance, narrative, design, and new media
Sundance New Frontier grant recipient, successful Kickstarter, powered by Soar.
You find yourself trapped in a bedroom with your first love, Carter. Play with each other using a gestural language pushing you both beyond idyllic fantasy to reveal the truth of your relationship.
Volumetric character rendering test - not final
“Emotional maneuvers” are a gestural language that bypass words and go straight to the feeling.
Begin with Push and Pull. As in life, you can push people away and you can pull them in. Of course, you can also push while pulling (classic flirtation). Some like to push just to see what happens. You could pull too hard, or you could pull just right. There’s a time and a place for everything.
Characters respond to these maneuvers as though you used words and “conversations” can quickly escalate. They might even transport you to entirely new places.
Use them to try and get what you want. Be a flirt or play hard to get. Discover new moves or escape from the situation altogether (there's a gesture for that).
The Goodbye Room has a strong focus on story and providing rewarding interactions with its inhabitants. This is enabled both by cutting-edge visual effects technology and an invented gestural communication language that seeks to bypass words and go straight to the feelings they carry. Virtual reality uniquely allows us visualize these feelings and explore their cause and effect.
The story is unapologetically queer, subverting the expectations of the young adult romance genre to explore tender connections in the shadow of trauma. Abstract yet accessible, its scenes quickly move from realistic and grounded to symbolic and gestural, reflecting a shifting emotional landscape in a moment of new perspective and growth.
In total, The Goodbye Room offers a cutting-edge experience made possible only through new technologies, a sandbox to explore relationship and feelings, and a layered, specific and universal story of love and heartbreak to push the medium forward.
Life is Strange | Episodic PC adventure game with
queer characters and themes.
Estimated Episode 1 Owners:
5,000,000 .. 10,000,000 (Steamspy)
Vader Immortal | Story and character-driven VR
experience.
4.5 Stars with 2,700+ ratings on Oculus Quest.
Gone Home | Critically-acclaimed PC adventure game
about formative queer love.
Estimated Owners: 500,000 ..
1,000,000 (Steamspy)
Max is an artist and developer using internal emotional landscapes to populate digital worlds. His work explores the tender intersections of queerness, family, relationship, and trauma.
He previously studied film and interaction design at California College of the Arts, interned at human-centered design firm IDEO, co-founded two Bay Area startups, and ran the development practice at a small digital agency in Berkeley, CA.
Khaela Maricich is an artist and writer working in and between performance, music, and physical media. Under the name The Blow she has produced albums and performance works, traversing the fields of popular music and contemporary art and taking advantage of the freedoms afforded in each realm. Frequently presenting performance art in a popular music context, her works excavate and introduce layers of fiction into settings presumed to be non-fictional, creating a platform for investigating the performance of the self. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in such venues as The Kitchen, The Wexner Center, The Warhol Museum, On The Boards, Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Art In General, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Henry Fonda Theater, Joe’s Pub, and Great American Music Hall. She writes about herself and other topics at www.khaelamaricich.com. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, she lives and works in New York City.
Lisa Watts is a passionate technologist with a strong background in developer relations, business development, marketing strategy, creative direction and virtual reality production. Lisa's deep hands-on technical expertise in both software and hardware development, coupled with her unique view on the marketplace have kept Lisa on the forefront of technology innovation. She is known for working closely with partners to develop and implement early technology with an eye towards market viability and leadership.
In her role as chief VR marketing strategist at Intel Corporation over the last 3 years, Lisa has been at the forefront of advising and producing some of the most innovative projects. Her partnership with ESL and Oculus led to the first ever VR esports league. Lisa led Intel's initial prototype investment and was an adviser on "Spheres" by director Eliza McNitt. Her promotion of the director and the project, (which included event appearances, digital marketing campaign and more) laid the foundation for "Spheres" to become the first ever VR experience of its type to be acquired for distribution and it went on to win multiple awards. As of 2019, Lisa established her own VR production and consulting company, One/Twenty1.
Hunter Dyar is an Immersive Media Coordinator & Instructor at Chatham university. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a masters in emerging media where he wrote his thesis on 360 Video and Virtual Reality Storytelling. He released his first indie game, Shadowbright, in 2018.
For inqueries: Max Ellinger | 480-240-8414 | maxellinger@gmail.com