Preview: The Unfinished Swan (Ian Dallas)
The Unfinished Swan is described as "a surreal maze game set in an entirely white world", and to find your way around you'll need to splatter paint all over the place.
This project was recently chosen as one of the finalists for Sense of Wonder Night 2008 and also Indiecade 2008. Joystiq is currently featuring five Indiecade finalists a day (out of a total of twenty-five), with the last ten to be mentioned tomorrow and the day after.
No playable build of The Unfinished Swan is available to the public currently, but there is a tech demo called Whitewash which bears more than a few similarities. (playable only on browsers with the Unity plugin installed, updated version)
Comments
Neat idea! :)
Is the whitewash implementation from someone totally independent from The Unfinished Swan person?
Now I want to see a multiplayer game where the players are all also white to start with, but if can be hit with the paint of other players, and with good 3D sound ...
Posted by: Zaphos | September 25, 2008 3:41 AM
"don't be afraid"
okay then, I won't be
still, looks neat
Posted by: alex | September 25, 2008 3:49 AM
Beautiful! I love the use of implied lines. What I mean is that when you splash paint near the edge of something, you don't see the whole edge, but your brain sees it. It fills in the gaps for you.
Like the box at :27 seconds. You can't see the WHOLE box, but you know it's there, because it's splashed with enough paint to outline the shape, and show the depth...
I think it's neat...
Posted by: Carlz0r | September 25, 2008 4:43 AM
Holy crap. I really hope this comes out soon because it looks amazing.
Posted by: Chetyre | September 25, 2008 6:22 AM
Looks amazing. aMAZEing. ahaha
But seriously. Ingenious.
Posted by: haowan | September 25, 2008 10:00 AM
This would be interesting to adapt to a 2D game. Perhaps a platformer.
Posted by: Paul Eres | September 25, 2008 10:04 AM
hopefully this is the same game as Whitespace, because otherwise it's a HUGE rip-off..
Posted by: raigan | September 25, 2008 2:31 PM
raigan: got a link to this "whitespace" you speak of? would be very interested in more information!
Posted by: haowan | September 25, 2008 4:03 PM
It's the same game as WhiteSpace. The designer just recently changed the name.
Posted by: Adam | September 25, 2008 4:45 PM
Well, bummer! That tech demo is/was me implementing what is fundamentally the exact same idea. What are the odds? I guess Ian put it together in finished-ish form first, though. Well done, good sir...bet we have similar thought patterns :).
Posted by: Steve Swink | September 25, 2008 5:42 PM
looks good, but honestly, it gets tiring after a while, I wouldn't stand playing a game like that for too long.
Posted by: raq | September 25, 2008 6:07 PM
I can't find a link, I guess it's the same game with a new name.. it was entered in IGF or Indiecade last year.
Posted by: raigan | September 25, 2008 7:13 PM
they are different games, made by different people. steve swink made whitewash, shawn white tweaked it a little to make it less processor dependent. ian dallas is making the unfinished swan. im not sure who released info first, or if they both thought of the same idea independently of each other.
Posted by: Spkl | September 25, 2008 10:49 PM
That is awesome!
Posted by: ronnoc | September 26, 2008 7:43 PM
It's an excellent tech demo and I love the look\feel of the game, but I wonder how they can integrating the paint shooting into the game so that it's not basically just a chore to keep firing it all the time.
Posted by: Richie | September 29, 2008 7:38 PM