A lovely change of pace at GameCity was donning a pair of headphones, grabbing a controller, and entering Proteus, a strange colourful exploration game, with an atmospheric ambient soundtrack. It’s not going to be out for a few months, but I spoke to half of the team behind it, Ed Key, so you can get an idea of what to expect in the meantime. Here’s what he said:

DIYgamer: So you made a game about wandering about?

Key: As someone said on twitter today, it’s a stroll simulator. In game terms, it’s inspired by all those bits between the towns in Oblivion, where you look at a big map and think “I’m just going to cut across here, and see if I get ambushed by a lion”, and Shadow of the Colossus, and things like that. The main inspiration is not from games at all, it’s going for a walk in real life. There’s no reward for it, there’s no objectives, it’s just a state of mind. Originally it was going to be an open ended RPG, or some kind of survival game, but a lot of that stuff got filtered out, especially after getting together with David Kanaga, it became purely about exploration, and a kind of synesthetic audiovisual discovery game, without being told what there is to discover.

DIYgamer: There’s a pixelated retro that seems more of a stylistic thing rather than a technical limitation. Is that accurate?

Key: It’s not a technical limitation, it’s a limitation of my artistic ability and my resources. I’m doing this in my spare time, I don’t have any artistic training apart from my art GCSE. But it’s kind of a style that out of a few iterations in the engine, I was just trying to work out what would look distinctive, and what would look be easy to produce.

DIYgamer: It’s quite bold. There’s big blocks of colour.

Key: The other little trick is that there is no hardware lighting, it’s all kind of interpreted palettes, so each time of day has got a different palette, and it transitions between them. So it allows you to do these weird, not quite realistic, lighting patterns. They’re not very intensive to produce, and you can get some weird effects.

DIYgamer: What’s going on with the music? I heard some strange sounds in my ears whilst I was playing it.

Key: It’s a reactive music system. The music is more generatively mixed. So most of the things in the game have got a loop associated with them, flower, trees and things like that, and they all get dynamically blended together. There’s twenty or so of these things in there, all this scripting system within the environment fades them in and out depending on where you are and what time of day it is. Then there are big feature sounds that get sprinkled into the mix.

DIYgamer: I noticed a pattern in the sky, what’s that about?

Key: That’s probably just the path of the sun and the moon. Originally it was a bug, then I fixed the bug, then I decided to put it back in. I just found it interesting.

DIYgamer: You realised it was a feature, not a bug.

Key: And not for the classic reason that I couldn’t fix it. What I found was interesting about it was that with that line there, you can anticipate where the sun come up, so you can watch the sun rise.

DIYgamer: Is there anything especially hidden in the world, that you might find after deep exploration.

Key: Nothing is really deeply hidden, there’s nothing where you have to do something to unlock something, but there are a lot of things that are subtle that you might not see in your first playthrough. There’s owls in the trees at night time, but a lot of people don’t see them. You might just get lucky on your first time and see them straight away, but sometimes you hear them around, then suddenly you see them fly across, and you find out what’s making the noise. There’s a lot of interactive things in the tower. Then there’s red flowers that produce a weird psychedelic effect. A lot of the time it’s not that they’re hidden, it’s just that people don’t find them.

DIYgamer: They can only look in so many places.

Key: Sure. It becomes a slightly sort of social thing, where one person finds something, and then they start telling other people where they can find things. But it’s procedurally generated, so it won’t be the same every time.

DIYgamer: How do things change?

Key: It’s just the layout of the island really. So it’s the same content, just rearranged. You might get lucky and find some really dramatic landforms, like a nice picturesque bay. But in general it is the same.

DIYgamer: It seems like a chill out game to me, the kind of game you might want to play to unwind. Is that the kind of mood you were aiming for?

Key: I suppose I wasn’t specifically aiming for that, but a lot of people have said that, and a lot of people have used it that way, a kind of de-stress thing. It’s funny, someone posted it on the Garry’s Mod forums, and most of the people in that forum thread were terrified of it: They didn’t find it relaxing at all, they couldn’t play it. I think the reason why was that there was a ghostly figure in it that I had accidentally reenabled, and took a screenshot of it, and that screenshot was in the thread, so people were expecting it to come. I think it’s because of the intensity of the atmosphere as well, people were really imagining something building up.

DIYgamer: How close to finished are you?

Key: I’m hoping to finish this version, which I’m calling an EP in the musical sense, in a couple of month. Just some extra bits on content in this version, and a bit more polish. It’s probably going to be something like $5 for the digital version, and we’re thinking of doing a physical version with a soundtrack and nice packaging.

DIYgamer: Thanks a lot.

Here’s a short trailer to look at:

[Proteus]