Proteus

Description

Proteus is a game about exploration and immersion in a dream-like island world where the soundtrack to your play is created by your surroundings. Presented and controlled like a classic first-person shooter, the primary means of interaction is simply your presence in the world. The procedurally generated islands are home to creatures natural and imagined, tranquil valleys and ruins with magical properties. Think Doom meets Brian Eno.

Features

• Meditative play: the responsive world and lack of any text or hints distils an essence of curious, investigative play, and rewards patience and immersion.
• Dynamic soundtrack composed by award-winning musician David Kanaga follows the mood of the world and will appeal to fans of Boards of Canada, Brian Eno.
• A distinctive 2D-but-3D graphical style with wild shifting palettes that sits somewhere between 8-bit videogames and early 20th century modernist painting.
• Islands are uniquely generated every time, and although it's theoretically possible to see everything in one playthrough, no-one ever does.
• Built-in "postcard" function encodes world data into each screenshot, allowing islands and discoveries to be saved and shared.

History

Beginnings

Ed began work on Proteus in his spare time in late 2009 as one of several experiments at creating a game to capture the feeling of freedom and wandering. The game was heading towards being some sort of open-world RPG but development in this fairly generic direction was already losing focus. Talking to David in early 2010 about music quickly bloomed into a conversation about something where music was a core part of the design: the world would sing to you and give a sense of performing the landscape.

Early Development and Response

We first started showing the project to people in 2011 and were almost surprised to find that the idea actually worked. Over the year it was refined further, still as a spare-time project, keeping things simple. We took it to Indiecade in October 2011 where we came away with the award for best Audio.

Beta

We released a Beta version of Proteus in February 2012 just before taking it to GDC as a finalist for the IGF's Nuovo award. Over the past few months we've been gradually adding new music, creatures and locations, the "postcard" system (see "Features") and filling out the overall arc of the game with a couple of dramatic new systems and effects. We were one of the final few games accepted onto Steam before the introduction of Greenlight.