The Indie Fix: Proteus
This post was meant to be about an old-school CRPG that has been in development (by some accounts) for over 15 years. After researching it for a while, I decided the wildly conflicting information, accusations, and internet insanity relating to that game made it a bit too… bizarre for me. I’ll just leave a link to that game’s blog here, and let you check it out for yourselves.
Instead I’ve decided to cover Proteus today.
In its current form, Proteus is a game about exploration. A quiet, meditative experience of wandering through strange, alien landscapes that are nevertheless very familiar. Procedurally generated worlds are laid out before the player with clean, simple pixel graphics in a 3D environment. I’d like to tell you more about the game, about some of the fantastic things you may come across in the game world, but I think it’s better to let the player discover these for themselves.
About all you can really do is run around, look at things, and take lovely little screenshots, all while listening to the calming and beautiful music of David Kanaga. I would strongly encourage fans of experimental electronic music to check out his site!
At an earlier point, Ed Key had mentioned that Proteus would be a lite RPG game, similar in some respects to Morrowind, but with procedurally generated worlds and not nearly as complex. I’m not sure how much that will play into the final build of the game as it stands now, and despite my massive love of Morrowind I’m not sure it needs to have such features. This is thus far about something slower, something more mental and less visceral, and I like it that way.
Proteus also recently made it into the finals for IndieCade, and by what I’ve seen and tried of the many excellent finalists, it fits in well with these highly imaginative games.
You can download a very early build of the game here.
And you can check out the developer’s blog here.
And finally, the game’s actual site, which is just a pretty placeholder at the moment, but will hopefully expand soon.
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Thanks for the nice article, it feels like you really “got” it
Just to clarify the “RPG-lite” point: This was the direction at once stage but we changed (for various reasons*). The first paid-for release will not have any goals or serious game mechanics, it’s all about the atmospheric exploration and discovery. The current development build has some changes to progession and more things to discover and interact with.
(*Partly because I have a different RPG project I want to work on between iterations of this project, if the first iteration goes down well)