The Unfinished Swan is now finished and I think it’s a pretty amazing game. You probably shouldn’t take my word for it though.

See, making a game is like having a baby. You put a lot of yourself into it, there’s a mad scramble to push it out at the end, and once it’s out there’s no way you can ever be objective about it. So I’m not the best judge of whether this game is any good.

What I can say though is that it’s definitely the game we wanted to make.

We set out to create a game about a sense of wonder, about what it feels like to discover astonishing new things. We wanted to create an experience where as soon as players started getting the hang of something the game would shift and they’d be on to something new. I’m still surprised we managed to pull it off because making a game like that is crazy.

In contrast, most games take a few core gameplay mechanics and then spend their whole time exploring how those mechanics work together and separately. Coming up with interesting mechanics is hard so there’s a lot of creative and financial incentive to keep a game focused on just a few of them. The result is that most games are about developing a sense of mastery, of what it feels like to become an expert.

The Unfinished Swan isn’t about being an expert. It’s about how it feels to be a child discovering a brand new world.

Having just finished our very first game, that’s a feeling all of us at Giant Sparrow can sympathize with. Like the game itself the process of making it was messy and full of surprises.

And we never would have finished it without the incredible support we’ve gotten from Sony. We also want to thank thatgamecompany, who are the reason that support exists. Their fantastic work proves what a small team can do with a bit of time and encouragement.

Most of all, we want to thank the PSN community for being so supportive of strange new experiences. Your enthusiasm for games of all kinds — even games that are unlike anything you’ve ever played before — is why Sony is able to keep taking chances on unusual games like Journey and The Unfinished Swan.

Thanks, everybody!

We had a very unique creative process. In planning out each level, we used a series of index cards representing emotional beats. I would then work with Ian to put together a rough version of the level. If something didn’t feel right, we’d cut it out and shuffle our cards. Hokyo sums it up really well when he says the experience of play is more like eating a meal than looking at a painting. We eat with our entire bodies, at our own pace, using all of our senses. The metaphor of food isn’t purely conceptual; both Hokyo and Ian’s love of food manifests itself in the personality of the King character. In one chapter, players explore the King’s dining hall, complete with an abandoned feast. Also, see if you can find a giant piece of toast hidden somewhere.

Working at Giant Sparrow has been a creative challenge. On one hand, we had a tremendous amount of freedom to experiment with new ideas. On the other, we were a very small team with limited resources, and working with a group of really creative people can be a game of compromises between tech, art, sound, and design. The best part about working with our small team was that the people posing questions were also the ones creating solutions.

Overall, The Unfinished Swan is a really personal game to all of us. We worked together for a long time and poured a lot of our own quirks and experiences into it. When you sit down to play, know that it was created from start to finish with your whole experience in mind. Go forth and explore.

The Unfinished Swan is an unusual game with an unusual history. We wanted to give you an exclusive look into its history before it lands on PSN October 23rd — as well as some secrets you’d never guess. Find out where we came up with the idea, who helped make it happen, and some techniques we used to make the game feel just right.

Want to find out more about The Unfinished Swan? Keep reading PlayStation.Blog for all the latest on this unique and beautiful game.

At its core, The Unfinished Swan is about the joy of creation and self-discovery. These themes revolve around two central characters: one young, who has dealt with great loss and loneliness, and one old, who must reconcile his current stage of life as well as his fate.

One of the initial conversations I had with Peter Scaturro, music supervisor at the Santa Monica Studio involved using the key components of the score to offset the melancholy of the story. I consciously steered away from anything that felt too sad, stark or desolate. Instead,

I focused on crafting a mood that was lush, curious, and warm. We wanted the music to serve as a companion for Monroe and the player as they explored the world of the game. To achieve this, I chose to highlight certain instruments and sounds that were inspired by the characters themselves. Monroe’s signature sound is played by plucked and mallet instruments like marimba and harp – youthful, resonant sounds that highlight his innocence as well as the storybook-quality of the game. The bizarre, pompous King is heralded by gritty, electronic harpsichord tones. I used acoustic sounds to imitate electronic, synthesized textures and vice versa – using analog modular synthesizers and extensive processing to evoke harpsichord and harp-like sounds. Too often, classical “thematic” scores are at odds with modern, texture-driven scores.

My goal was to blur the lines and try to find the best of both worlds: to use the opportunity I had as a composer not just to write a score, but to knit the fabric for this world, completely from scratch. Aside from live string orchestra, every sound in the score is original. The compositional process was about subverting all traditional rules in favor of something more textural, more free-flowing – like an ocean of sound. Classical theory and traditional harmonic structures are here, but they’re lurking far below the surface. In-game ambient music is always evolving, never confined to a static loop. I wanted the music to feel seamless with the gameplay, as if it is part of the environment.

And that brings us back to the joy of creation – there’s a certain naivety in so much of my favorite art. The Unfinished Swan was the perfect opportunity to explore that. I’m so excited to put this out into the world. It was an incredible experience working with Giant Sparrow and the SCEA Music Department.

We can all relate to Monroe’s mother and The King. The spark at the beginning of a project is what we love best about creating. The real work begins when we have to develop that initial idea into a finished product, and I’m confident that no one has played or heard a game quite like The Unfinished Swan.

Now we have an answer: you can buy The Unfinished Swan on October 23rd exclusively on PSN for $14.99. And if you’re a PlayStation Plus member, you can get the game a week early — October 16th.

In the meantime, there’s still a lot to learn about the game. You’ve met the King, now get to know us: the team behind it all. In the first of a series of developer diaries, we’ll lift the curtain and give you some background on Giant Sparrow, the beginning of The Unfinished Swan and how we landed on PlayStation Network. Check it out:

Leading up to launch on October 23rd, we will be back to dive in and show you all you need to know about The Unfinished Swan. For more news about the game you can check out the Giant Sparrow company blog.

Can’t wait for you all to play the game!

On stage we had Ian Dallas, Hokyo Lim, Max Geiger, and me. We showed off some never-before-seen concept art, and talked about how we developed the art style for The Unfinished Swan. We’ve been really quiet throughout development in hopes of preserving the game’s surprises, so it was refreshing to have the chance to speak with fans about our inspirations. Thanks for being patient with us! We’ve got more to reveal soon, so keep in touch with us on Twitter and be sure to comment here!

If you’ve ever heard of The Unfinished Swan before I’d like to start by saying I’m sorry.

Back in 2008, when we posted videos of the prototype online, a lot of people got really excited. And then a few years went by without another word. So if you’ve been wondering “whatever happened to that weird black and white painting game?” thanks for waiting!

If this is all new to you, here’s the gist: The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game that begins in a totally white space. You throw globs of paint to explore the world around you. In the game you’re a boy named Monroe who’s chasing after a swan. The swan stepped out of a painting and has wandered off into a surreal, unfinished world. Here’s what it looks like:

So what have we been doing these last few years? Judging from our blog, mostly we’ve been having team lunches and then posing for photos. Which is partly true. But also we started a company called Giant Sparrow and then signed a deal with Sony to make The Unfinished Swan for PSN.

For those of you familiar with Sony’s relationship with thatgamecompany, it’s the same kind of thing. Sony calls it an “incubation deal.” In addition to giving us funding they also provide office space, equipment and advice (often in the form of this cheerful graphics programmer from the God of War team). The best part is that we get to focus all of our energies on just making a game.

That’s great because it turns out that making a game is hard. But it’s almost done and we’re super excited to start talking about it.

One of the biggest challenges we had was figuring out what the game was going to be about. The idea of painting a white world is pretty abstract. You could make all kinds of different games about that. A lot of people who saw it a few years ago assumed it was going to be a horror game. And it totally could have been. But after splatting stuff for a few months we realized what we liked most about it was the sense of wonder it created. We liked not knowing what was out there.

So we made a game about creating a sense of wonder. Our goal is to give players strange and beautiful experiences they’ve never had before. We want to give people genuine surprises and then keep on surprising them the whole game. The painting a white world stuff is actually just the first 15 minutes. After that, things get really weird.