Noah Thompson Announces Free Spectral Map Demo

Noah Thompson, a California sound designer and media artist who releases games as FleshWare, will put out a free demo of Spectral Map on Steam on Oct. 19, the opening day of Steam Next Fest. Thompson confirmed the date in a post marking 5,000 wishlists, a few days after sharing clips from the new tutorial. Watch the trailer below.

The Steam page describes Spectral Map as "a claymation dreamscape on the brink of a Pollutant-based apocalypse." Almost every visual element is made from clay, either animated by hand in stop motion or 3D-scanned into the game. Movement is modeled on the Source engine: players surf, bunny-hop, rocket jump and grapple across the map, and an adaptive audio system granulates the score according to the player's momentum. The world holds more than a hundred variants of non-player characters.

The demo opens on a tutorial area added in an Oct. 12 update, with a new track the developer calls the Plasticine Membrane. The game is listed for Windows and has no full release date. Steam's content notes flag animated body horror and pixelated blood. Steam Next Fest runs through Oct. 26.

Thompson is studying for a master's degree in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a focus on creative programming, according to Thompson's site. The site lists more than seven years of sound design and music production, including contract work for the sample company Splice.

For more reading, see Armikrog and the unfulfilled promise of claymation videogames, For Slum Lord's cover, Mason Lindroth stayed in clay and the Spectral Map page on Thompson's site.