We’re t-minus 13 days until everyone can download and play The Unfinished Swan, and we’ve got 4 pieces of news for you today:
First up, Sony’s posted another excellent developer diary for The Unfinished Swan. This one is about the music in the game, and it features composure Joel Corelitz talking about how he breathed life into the musical world of Swan. Joel works under the name waveplant, and you can find more of his work at waveplantstudios.com.
Fourth and finally, we’ve thrown up some pictures of our Indiecade trip on Imgur, check out the album and see which splats we gave away. Also the luscious hair portrait I got with John Romero.
UPDATE: Two things now that we’ve actually been at Indiecade a little bit:
1. To claim your poster, you must visit our booth and tell us the pass phrase in person. Our booth is in Sony’s tent, they’re calling it “The Creators Lounge.”
2. Ben’s showing Kachina in a tent right next to the Creator’s Lounge/check-in tent, not the Firehouse. You can follow him directly for more deets on twitter: @torahhorse
True Believers, bear with me as I enthusiastically hammer this post out in my rush to physically be at Indiecade, rather than writing about it. Everything that we could possibly desire to have happen is happening this week!
RELEASE DATE (it’s 23 OCT 2012):
First, as of 6 AM this morning, Sony has lifted the press embargo on our release date. The Unfinished Swan will be available for download on PSN on October 23rd. PlayStation Plus subscribers can get the game a week early, on October 16th. Sony even has a store page primed and ready!
INDIECADE:
We’ll be at Indiecade all weekend! We’ll be showing The Unfinished Swan in Sony’s pavilion, which will be open the following times:
5 pm – 7 pm Friday, 10/5 (TODAY!!!)
10 am – 7 pm Saturday, 10/6 (Tomorrow!)
12 pm – 5 pm Sunday, 10/7 (The distant future.)
We will be stopping by over the course of the weekend– consider this our “home base” at Indiecade. This will also be the location of our giveaway, which brings me to my next point!
POSTER GIVEAWAY:
Indiecade would not be complete without swagschwag presents. If you remember way back in 2009, we spent a morning throwing a bunch of paint around an undisclosed location. That was only the first time we did that. At a later date, with great experimental rigor, we decamped to another secret location and dropped paint onto a series of poster boards, in effect creating giant slides of reference splats. These slides were later photographed, scanned, and used as source material for the splats in the game throughout Unfinished Swan‘s development.
A very limited number of these survived, and we’ve turned them into signed and framed posters (see above). We’ll be giving one away every half hour to the first person who tells us the day’s pass phrase that we announce on twitter through the @GiantSparrow account.
Thank you to the handsome and talented Joshua Beeler, Cory Davis, and Julius Edraisa for modeling the poster for us.
DEVELOPER DIARY:
Sony filmed a series of these Developer Diaries with us, they offer a unique perspective into the development of the game. If you’re not a fan of the PlayStation Blog, you can check out the first one on Youtube (or here):
That’s all for now, we hope to see you at Indiecade!
I lied. That was not all. I almost forgot that Giant Sparrow’s level designer extraordinaire, Benjamin Esposito (@torahhorse), has a personal game at Indiecade. He’ll be showing his game,Kachina, in the firestation (edit: Ben’s actually showing Kachina with the other games by the main checkin area) with all the other Official Selections. Check it out!
We took a trip up to Descanso Gardens in February of this year.Why a botanical garden? Well in their own words, this is what Descanso Gardens has to offer:
“Descanso Gardens is an urban retreat of year-round natural beauty, internationally renowned botanical collections and spectacular seasonal horticultural displays. In 1953, Descanso founder E. Manchester Boddy preserved these 150 acres of gardens, woodlands and chaparral for future generations to experience the natural heritage and beauty of Southern California.”
If you’re not pumped about 150 acres of gardens, woodlands, and chaparral, your childhood is missing a little piece of magic by one Mr. Chris Van Allsburg:
The gardens themselves are just out of Los Angeles proper, and are a good place to spend a relaxing afternoon walking around, feeding koi, maybe dozing, or just getting your look-at-a-plant on.
Wander around for a bit, and you’ll find yourself pleasantly lost. Each path has its own charms worth exploring, and the closer you look, the more paths there seem to be. Also, there are ducks.
If you include the student version of the game, we’ve been working on The Unfinished Swan for a little over two years. And until now our most recent screenshots were from a year and a half ago when the game was shown at the Independent Games Festival.
That all ends today, my friends. Having recently passed our publisher’s First Playable Milestone we now have a very basic, totally incomplete version of the game up and running on our unnanounced downloadable platforms. Which means we can finally post some new screenshots.
Well, one screenshot. Our publisher has asked us to keep things under wraps until we’re a bit further along, but they’ve graciously allowed us to release a single screenshot from the current game. Keep in mind there’s still a lot of work to be done so everything you see is subject to change. That being said, we’re pretty excited about where things are headed. Here’s our game in its current state running (for now) at 60 frames-per-second in glorious black and white!
