PROTEUS

PROTEUS (PC) is perhaps the purest "Just Walking" experience. Exploring the geography of PROTEUS at one's leisure provokes expressive shifts in soundscape & world state.

• type: videogame, music
• style: "Just Walking"
• cost: less than 10$
• platform: electric computers
• recommended: yes 
• creators: Ed Key, David Kanaga.
• vendor: visitproteus.com

//////////////////////// RESPONSE FROM C

"...it started to seem like we could pilot capably with our eyes closed, using sound cues to judge our craft's orientation, velocity, altitude, status and position."

PROTEUS represents something pretty profound to me, in that the concepts it explores have been with me for years. These concepts - absolute discoverability, soundscapes authored for particular times & spaces - are foundational for the new Superbrothers project, and consequently Proteus has been high on my list of 'videogames to study' for a while now.

Years ago, Patrick & I explored similar concepts using sounds from Jim Guthrie & I Am Robot in a 3-D flight-inspired prototype. Skate along on the surface of water or ground (ie: flying below a particular altitude) to provoke a funky/fun ground effect loop, go faster and the ground effect loop would switch gears to something a little bit more energetic & louder. Skate up a hillside & launch up into the sky high and the ground effect loop sounds would fall off, fly high enough into the sky and all sounds will fall off leaving a subtle, expansive tingling sound. Glide down to the ground and as your craft nears the surface a cello plays a series of suspenseful notes, quiet at first but rising in volume and intensity as the surface rushes up to meet you. At the moment of impact, your craft automatically switches back to skate mode - you're safe and whizzing along the surface at speed accompanied by a funky, fun ground effect loop. We were loving these concepts like crazy and we explored even more in this direction, adding musical sounds to structures and locations in the world, to the point where it started to seem like we could pilot capably with our eyes closed, using sound cues to judge our craft's orientation, velocity, altitude, status and position.

PROTEUS explores similar territory and the result is magnificent. There is one soundscape for travelling over water, a new set of sounds for travelling over land, yet another set of sounds kicks in while exploring the tops of hills. PROTEUS has a day/night cycle as well as dynamic weather systems, and particular times of day and conditions have their own sonic soul. These concepts have existed in open-world adventure videogames for ages but in PROTEUS they are foregrounded and are often exquisitely expressive.

"It's just walking?!"

With the original prototype for Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP my aim was to create an exploratory short story beginning in the grey hour before dawn, progressing by stages through a pink dawn. Jim Guthrie's song "Under a Tree" provided the structure & the progression, and the song directly lead to the series of locations that now constitute Side B. In this prototype there was no overt narrative or quest, the player was free to poke, prod and direct The Scythian along the paths, while each new location introduced a new phrase of the song, revealing new moods. In a particular location a character known as The Grizzled Boor would appear and run off, in another location he would appear again but only briefly, and much later he would be seen hiding inside a titanic tree. It was up to the player to investigate inside the tree, a decision that would lead to a combat encounter, which in turn would lead to a moral choice. It was equally valid for the player to ignore The Grizzled Boor and the titanic tree and continue up the path to a hut, where the song resolved itself in a dreamy, hazy drone as dawn broke in the sky above.

It was this prototype that was playable at the Independent Games Festival pavillion at GDC 2010, and while the prototype met with a very positive response, when it was shown to Baiyon he responded a little incredulously, blurting out the exclamatory question "It's Just Walking?"

In truth, it was... or at least, 'just walking' was a core concept for the kind of low-stress, discoverable story-world I had in mind for Sword & Sworcery... however, due in part to the sudden interest in the project we felt a duty to create a more substantial and maybe slightly less experimental videogame experience, so while many of the above-described elements survived in the final release for Sword & Sworcery in Session II, the simplicity and vision of this initial composition did not. While I discreetly mourn the loss of what could have been in this particular case, in the end Sword & Sworcery became precisely what it ought to have been: a strange patchwork quilt of 'just walking' and more traditional adventure mechanics shot through with moments that stir the soul.

In any case, with PROTEUS it is possible to experience a 'just walking' style videogame in its purest form. It presents a world populated by discovereable a/v ideas, a world whose mood changes depending on where you are, what time of day it is, what the weather is up to. In my first proper session with PROTEUS in the summer of 2012 I found myself spell-bound for a day, a night and yet another day... at length, however, I became conscious of an inclination to do something, or to discover something else, for some new concept to be revealed.

Still, the PROTEUS experiment is to me a resounding success, it confidently proves out a great many concepts that are near and dear to me and it has a soul and a vision all its own.

/////////////////// TAKE-AWAYS FOR THE FUTURE

What we'll do that Proteus also did:

• pure simplicity from the get-go
• absolute discoverability
• soundscapes designed for particular spaces & times
• soundscapes for particular terrain, velocities
• dynamic systems > photo-realistic representations (eg: blocky sprite-based clouds behave like real clouds)
• the whitecap wave representation style is along the lines of what I have in mind for surfacing

What we'll do that Proteus didn't do:

• motion will have a feel that will evoke skating, carving & gliding
• after a day & a night & a day, introduce a new system to deepen the player's engagement
• a story concept with characters and a science fiction narrative arc will emerge eventually

Once our concept is further along it may be worthwhile for us to reach out to Ed Key and/or David Kanaga, probably separately, as our efforts might be of interest to them.