Video Interview: Student Developer of Unfinished Swan, 2009 IGF Student Showcase Finalist

Ian talks about student game development and making Unfinished Swan…

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Show Notes:

Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference at the IGF Student Competition and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ian: Oh, yeah, I’m Ian Dallas. I was the designer and programmer on the Unfinished Swan, the first person painting game set entirely in web form.

Interviewer: So, what do you mean by first person painting game?

Ian: It’s a game played from the first person perspective but instead of shooting a gun the player throws paint balls that splatter the entirely white walls so that how they figure out where the floors, walls and ceiling are, what it is that is out there and just totally wipes it.

Interviewer: So, once they throw paint and they find out what’s going on, they use that to move around or get to the end goal or what?

Ian: The paint is how they can figure out where they can go and also with what they can interact with and all kinds of space.

Interviewer: I guess, what inspired the game?

Ian: The game right now is a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Emperor Gory and the Japanese [?] and then Terry Gilliam, Time Bandits especially. It’s sort of a stew of all of those disparate spices.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges you encountered when you developed the game?

Ian: Well, the big challenge was figuring out what to do with the mechanics. So, the paint splatter mechanics was something that everybody really loved and worked for about two minutes, and then people got a little bit bored because the initial version of the game was just the white walls and it was just boxes and tiers and kind of moving around space.

People wanted a lot more content, and they wanted more of a sense of where am I going and who am I and what am I doing. So, the challenge for me was figuring out to provide some structure without ruining the sense of infinite possibilities that you get from the white room . You have to say the game is about this and not about that.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Ian: Is it a horror game? Well, no, there are scary and moments of terror in the game, but it’s its own thing. That was the big challenge that we had, how to convey what the game is without…

Interviewer: How did you overcome that challenge? Was it just extensive testing?

Ian: No, I tried really hard for a couple of months thinking things and trying a bunch of different versions and writing a back story, and then I just gave up. I spent about six months not working on the game and working on totally different games. It was always percolating in the back of my mind, but I tried consciously not to think about it.

Then, it just sort of hit me when I was working on it one day that it was the feeling that I wanted in the game. So, now that I have a model it is easier to work back from and say, how do I get that feeling? What is that feeling?

Interviewer: Once you came to that realization, what was the next step in terms of development? Like, how long did it take after that to finish it up?

Ian: It took around three months to knock together this prototype although I had done a bit of work before that so it wasn’t starting from scratch.

The main challenge was figuring out, of these hundreds of ideas that I have that are based on painting, what are the things that actually work for this children’s book and feel that I want? How do I stream that together in something that is satisfying and interesting?

Interviewer: OK.

Ian: It proved to be a bit of a challenge.

Interviewer: Did you have any other people help you make the game?

Ian: Yeah, there was the animator who helped with the cinematics for the game, and then there was a modeler who did some creature animation.

Interviewer: Was this game done inside class or outside of class?

Ian: It was outside of class.

Interviewer: OK.