Over three years ago, Ian Dallas released a nifty tech demo. The demo showed what appeared to be a solid white screen, but when black paint was thrown around, the structure and geometry of a maze was revealed. Dallas is a game designer with the development studio Giant Sparrow. The tech demo got a lot of people excited when it was released, but no follow-through was ever announced for the concept.
Luckily for Dallas, Sony saw the demo and provided him with the resources he needed to refine the demo into a game. Dallas writes at the Playstation blog:
So what have we been doing these last few years? Judging from our blog, mostly we’ve been having team lunches and then posing for photos. Which is partly true. But also we started a company called Giant Sparrow and then signed a deal with Sony to make The Unfinished Swan for PSN.
Today at the Playstation blog, Dallas announced that The Unfinished Swan is almost ready for release. A teaser trailer for the game accompanied the post, and it looks impressive. Dallas calls the game a “first-person painting game” and said it begins in white space, just like the tech demo. Throwing blobs of paint allows exploration of a “surreal, unfinished world” that the character, a boy named Monroe, entered while chasing after a swan. Dallas said the game would be about more, and be far weirder than, simply throwing paint around:
Our goal is to give players strange and beautiful experiences they’ve never had before. We want to give people genuine surprises and then keep on surprising them the whole game. The painting a white world stuff is actually just the first 15 minutes. After that, things get really weird.
This interesting indie title seems to have come out of nowhere, even though Dallas and Giant Sparrow have been working on it for years. The trailer ends with a shot of a giant maze surrounding a castle, and I am interested to see what that is about. The game seems to be an artsy puzzle game, a genre I particularly enjoy. Take a look at the trailer for yourself and leave a comment letting me know what you think of it.