Article by Matt S.
As our regular readers would know by now, we have launched a Kickstarter to fund the production of a book on the topic of games as art.
And core to that book will be interviews with some of the games industry’s most prominent artistic game developers. With that in mind, I thought we would do a series of developer profiles to introduce you to some of the developers that you’re perhaps not as aware of.
If you want to hear more (much, much more) from these developers, then please do back the Kickstarter; it will provide you with some genuinely unique insights into how games are made, straight from the minds of the developers that make them.
Ed Key is responsible for Proteus. It’s rare for any artist to have such an influential and talked-about game for their first independent release, but that simply speaks to the quality of Proteus.
As an exploration into the nature of game development and the interaction between player control and music, Proteus is a fascinating experiment. Presenting players with a procedurally-generated world and then letting them lose, Proteus doesn’t feature a line of text or a word of spoken dialogue, and yet it offers an intense narrative that is told entirely through player action, and the fact that each player action creates noise, and those noises create a unique soundscrape for each new game.
It’s a striking, unique experience, and we very glad indeed to be able to interview Key for The Interactive Canvas. This interview will focus very closely on the game of Proteus itself – where the inspiration for the game came from, but also Key’s philosophy towards player interactivity a nonlinear storytelling through play.
Ed Key and Proteus are very much core to the idea of The Interactive Canvas, and so if you’re a fan of the game, you’re going to love the interviews that you’ll find in this book.
Be sure to back us on Kickstarter and reserve your copy of the book!
– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld
