The Unfinished Swan gets 10 rather interesting facts

By: Musa Afridi

  |   October 12th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Part 1: Ben Esposito, the Game Designer working on the upcoming USC developed game, explained a number of reasons why Giant Sparrow’s upcoming game development process.

The Unfinished Swan was originally a project by a group of USC students before Sony expressed their interest and snapped up exclusivity rights for the game. The title is now a PlayStation Network exclusive and the studio in charge of development, Giant Sparrow, is set to see their game release on the 23^rd of October.

Apparently a lot went on behind the scenes that Ben Esposito believes will interest gamers, and to be fair, they do.

The first point was Virtual Reality and how the game “started as a student project in the University of Southern California’s Interactive Program. Originally it was meant to be played with a head-mounted display.”

Seeing how the medium of gaming is slowly heading towards virtual and augmented reality, it seems that the developers may well be on track to maybe bring the first mainstream VR game into the market, or not, but they seem to have the idea in their mind and that could make all the difference.

The second fact highlighted was ‘Showing our roots’. As it turns out “the pond, which is the opening area of The Unfinished Swan, hasn’t changed since we entered the game into the Independent Games Festival in 2009.”

“The reasons were partly to keep a homage to the area that got us started, and also because it’s a successful level layout.”

For those who are still confused as to how the game works, players have to traverse through a map where objects and obstacles become visible by throwing paint on them. It is a unique experience and one that has a number of gamers excited.

At the same time another fact revealed that the studio chose to remain small throughout the development process with no more than 12 people working on the game at any point. This was apparently done as it allowed them more freedom to experiment and be “able to try things big studios wouldn’t touch.”

There was another decision made by the studio in terms of how the game’s character, Monroe, would ‘shoot’ the paint. Many players wanted a gun to do so, but Giant Sparrow was not having any of it and decided to introduce a different system, where the game would let the players throw paint at whatever they were pointing at by automatically adjusting the arc.

Contrary to popular belief players will also be able to run in the game; all they need to do is keep moving forward for a specific period of time and “Monroe starts to pick up his pace.”

There were five more facts revealed and they can be found by clicking here.