Proteus (2013)
I needed something soothing after last weekend, so I decided that it was time for a vacation in the relaxing symphony world of Proteus.The heart of Proteus is in its procedural generation. The postcards saved from the game with F9 even come with the address of the island, the seed that it grew from. This time I visited island #1457104792.
Proteus has a relatively wide and flat interactive structure: where you are on the island is the primary thing that determines what you see, not your actions beforehand. There is very gentle gating as the island progresses through the seasons, and so the result induces quiet contemplation rather than obsessive exploration.
Proteus doesn’t get its interest from huge variation or complex interactions. Instead, it composes vignettes that induce the perfect momentary mood, like a visual haiku.
And that’s the heart of Proteus: it’s a place where it’s worth stopping to sit and watch the sun set.
I need to take more walks in Proteus (with the Purgateus mod too).
And take/save postcards. I’ve never saved postcards.(Is there a way to “load” a world with a specific seed to revisit it?)
Your two thoughts are connected: Proteus postcards contain the seed for the world they were created in, hidden in the lower left corner of the image:
Since procedural generation can often be reduced to tiny seed numbers, this is a neat trick for easily sharing game information between players. Spore does something similar, apparently using the alpha channel, though there are several other ways to embed arbitrary data into PNGs.