are twisted trees games?

#screenshotsaturday - working on a few new things + fixes for...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:30:00 +0000

#screenshotsaturday - working on a few new things + fixes for the IGF expo build.

(Edit: This build will also be the preorder/beta build)

Follow-up to the earlier post, here’s a photo of Proteus...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:36:38 +0000

Follow-up to the earlier post, here’s a photo of Proteus being played on the big screen. More Bit of Alright photos here

Been working on colour theory and palettes recently. One of the...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:26:00 +0000

Summer dawn, looking out to sea

Summer daytime

Summer late afternoon; surreal sky

Been working on colour theory and palettes recently. One of the problems has been that at some times (midday, mainly) the colours are rather bland. I’ve been spicing up dawn and dusk already, and now turning to morning/afternoon. I’m also trying to coordinate all the colours with eachother in a more coherent way, with lots of colour-theoretical help from friends. This game is quite a nice warm-up for this sort of work.

(Just noticed on the 3rd pic - tree bases looking weird are an artefact of the “reload colours” debug feature)

News and stuff

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:22:28 +0000

Welcome to the regular Proteus news ‘n’ updates post! Ahh, who am I kidding… maybe someday soon I’ll have a regular update habit. Anyway!

We’re nominated for the IGF Nuovo prize. Hooray! If you’re in SF for GDC, see you there!
In case I didn’t already post it here, the plan is to have a new website at www.visitproteus.com and a paid preorder open for GDC. It’ll be Windows-only at first, until I get time to look at Linux and OSX.
I went to Bit Of Alright in London on Friday, masterminded by David Hayward. Ricky Haggett asked me a ton of penetrating questions about Proteus whilst Michael Brough played the game on a projector in the background, and got a spontaneous round of applause for capturing the moment when an owl flew across the moon. I kinda wish someone had recorded it so I could remember what I said and what people asked.
Also at BoA, I put Proteus on a big projector and didn’t talk about it at all. Felt very weird at the time, but seemed to go down really well. I guess at the end of a day of talks and sessions it’s nice to not have someone (me) droning on at you. This writeup has nice words to say.
Three other amazing things happened, but I can’t say what they are yet.

A new autumn-centric location

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:40:59 +0000

A new autumn-centric location

“Ok, I’ll try it, but it’ll just break...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:00:46 +0000

“Ok, I’ll try it, but it’ll just break everything!”

“…”

“Whoah…”

Field notes on the flow of sonic energy around an ancient site....

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:00:06 +0000

Field notes on the flow of sonic energy around an ancient site. Recorded by Dr David Kanaga, Archaeoaudiology Department, National University of Nodeland, in the autumn expedition of 2X11.

Oh yes: Teabags!

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:19:00 +0000

Proteus won 4 Golden Teabags at the #indievisiblity awards party last night!

This was weirdly overwhelming! I’d been tipped off about one of them (the “Best Placeholder” nomination) but otherwise they were a big suprise. Really touching, especially Notch’s nice message about Proteus - “using small tools to convey big messages that might not even be there”.

I loved the absurdist golden spray-painted teabags and One Life Left’s twitter-prank of stitching up Dan Marshall as drunkenly punching one of the winners (me, as it turned out). More award “ceremonies” should be this way.

Huge thanks to Dan and Sheridans for organising and sponsoring such a great evening, and the One Life Left team for exuberant hosting duties.

Also big love to Alex May for the bed for the night and the 2am omelette feast, and Micheal Brough for being a magical wizard and bringing his iPad and dev build of Glitch Tank.

Amazing to meet up with all the London bunch, old friends and new. Best ever Christmas “office party”! I think I’ve shaken off the hangover now.

(ah, oh yeah: listen out for the next episode of 99coins. They’re doing a report on the awards and I’ll hopefully be on it talking about… whatever it was I was talking about. If I’m struggling to suppress a giggle it’s because Charlie was performing a lewd dance in the background)

UDPATE

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:09:49 +0000

I forgot about tumblr for a while… need to get back into the habit! For now, here’s a quick “we’re not dead” post:

Currently we’re working on a content milestone (in a very loose sense) for the 20th: New animals, new “portal” effects and musical score and various refinements and improvements to how things are communicated. After that, we’ve a new block of content to add into Autumn; currently the emptiest season, except the deliberately empty one….

All this is going a bit slowly because I’m only working on this in my spare time, but I hope we’ll be able to release early next year. COMING Q1 2012, one might even say.

More realistically: It’ll be done when it’s done, but we have a pretty clear idea of the content of the release, so it’s not going to creep in scope too much.

Here are some links about stuff that’s happened over the past few months:

We won the Audio award at Indiecade! (And also had an amazing Yosemite-Death Valley roadtrip organised by Doug “J.S. Joust” Wilson)
I spoke to Lewie Procter at diygamer.com about Proteus after showing it GameCity in Nottingham (also mentioned in the Guardian piece here)
Robert Yang and I had a very enjoyable rambling discussion about games and exploration for his “Level With Me” series on RPS
Electron Dance posted a lovely write-up of a Proteus preview build. The video is one of the nicest bits of Proteus feedback I’ve had. “Very very day” is now a stock phrase in our house. It’s also slightly shaped the direction of the game. I hope Joel’s son likes the effect!
We submitted Proteus to IGF. Fingers crossed!

What else…

New Proteus site

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:02:43 +0100

New Proteus site:

www.visitproteus.com is currently only a “landing page”, but will eventually have downloads, video, news, etc. for Proteus. Once it’s fully up and running, this tumblr might become more about cool stuff I’ve found, but I’ll keep the two sites connected.

Or I might find a way to integrate the tumblr with the site? Not sure yet.

Indiecade

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:23:00 +0100

So this thing happened:

You can read the full list of finalists here, and read a PC-centric write up from RPS here (the very kind words about Proteus at the end made me well up a bit whilst on the train back from London)

It’s amazing to be part of this. I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of great people that I only know online and catching up with friends who also got shortlisted.

Some picks of finalists that I’m especially excited about for various reasons:

At A Distance - I played a very early development build of Terry’s game, but so far not in the way it was intended: Two indirectly connected players, exploring and shaping the world. The graphics bring back fond memories of 3D Construction Kit on the Spectrum.

Ordnungswissenschaft - Because this.

FEZ - Indie dev legend. Almost finished apparently!

Geobook - Really fascinating concept of an interactive textbook. Reminds me of reading through this textbook to get into a good mindset for world generation.

Pewpewpewpewpew - microphone-controlled co-op shooter. Bound to be hilarious to watch

Hohokum - Made by some good friends. I played briefly at IGF and I’m looking forward to see Ricky madly coding up new features on the exhibition-floor again.

J.S. Joust - Another game-meets-public-performance, I played this at the Wild Rumpus event in London last week. Supposedly we’re going to be playing a tournament on top of Clouds Rest in Yosemite on a camping trip before heading down to Indiecade. Not quite sure why I signed up for that now.

But there are too many to mention!

Oh, ok, one more: Skulls of the Shogun looks like a fun slant on the turn-based tactics genre, and amazingly polished.

We’re going to L.A.!!!

Workin’ on some fancy effects after getting annoyed trying...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:15:12 +0100

Workin’ on some fancy effects after getting annoyed trying to debug a graphics bug. I think that’s probably just a recipe for more graphics bugs…

(This isn’t a final pic… not sure it looks right with all those shades)

An ancient ancestor of Proteus?

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:23:00 +0100

I think this came up in conversation on twitter a few weeks ago.

About 19 years ago, issue 33 of Amiga Format landed next to my A500+. One of the coverdisks looked like this:

It was a fractal landscape generator. Even back then, the images had a weird grainy charm to them and I spent many days setting up renders and waiting for the results. At the highest detail it took about 45 minutes to render an image, leading to some tense moments turning the TV back on to see if it had got to the final stage of rendering where the image started to become visible. If you were unlucky a piece of terrain that hadn’t appeared in the lower-resolution previews would have popped up in front of the camera and ruin the view!

If you take a look at the “Pages” links on the right hand side of this page you can flick through the tutorial that came in the magazine, including some lovely example shots of a virtual Yosemite valley.

When I have time, I might try and set up WinUAE and render some Vistas for old times sake and post them up, no doubt with more nostalgic blubbing :)

Edit: Fixed the link above, and here’s an image cropped from the magazine scan:

One of the things I’ve been working on: New location types...

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:10:45 +0100

One of the things I’ve been working on: New location types to discover. This is a mysterious tower. Mysterious things will happen in its vicinity.

Oh, devblog, I'm sorry I neglected you

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:08:30 +0100

I keep having good intentions of updating this on a regular basis, maybe even weekly.

Maybe I’ll try to keep that up for the next couple of months. Maybe something exciting will happen?

Making Proteus accessible

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:12:29 +0100

This is great: Information on how to make Proteus (and other games) playable with one-switch and other accessible input systems.

via http://twitter.com/OneSwitch

YouTube video roundup (??)

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:42:30 +0100

Searching for my old Proteus videos, I discovered a lot of “let’s play” type clips. I was quite blown away!

Here they are!

Part 1, Part 2 - These two are probably my favorite raw footage

Exploring Proteus - Another wandering-around clip

This one has some good portal action (and I just spotted a horrible cloud/rain bug that has since been fixed. The player was kind enough not to dwell on it :))

“Day of Proteus” This one has a whole live-action intro, making good use of audio files for the soundtrack! (The creator sent me a link to this one a while ago, so it’s the only one that wasn’t a suprise)

And finally: The One With The Voiceover Sorry about the long loading time and the lack of monsters!

That these are all from the February build, so the portals work a bit differently amongst other things.

Watch this space for a new “official” video.

Watching from a clifftop at dawn as a raincloud comes in(Taken...

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:50:14 +0100

Watching from a clifftop at dawn as a raincloud comes in
(Taken by a friend whilst testing - I’m getting lazy at making screenshots!)

And this is where I’m going with a friend later this...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:55:55 +0100

And this is where I’m going with a friend later this month. Look familiar?

Release plan: "Proteus EP"

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:51:44 +0100

We’re thinking of releasing the Indiecade version plus fixes, tweaks and a few extra bits and calling it the “EP.” It’ll probably sell for about $5. There’ll be a free cut-down demo.

Depending on interest and energy levels, we’ll make an “LP” version later with more content which will either be free or discounted for “EP” owners.

Lastly, we’ve got a plan to make a nice “physical” edition. This will consist of an audio CD and a somewhat-special edition of the game. This will probably be the core game plus an extra mode, and maybe some snapshots of old versions of the game and some strange little side-branches that got chopped off but might but interesting.

There should be an exciting new trailer sometime soon :)