Painter Readme.txt written 29 January 2006 One day I was thinking about what kind of game I would make for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console, and I thought it might be neat to use the controller as a paintbrush to paint pictures on the screen. That idea by itself was not enough to determine gameplay (why are you painting pitcures?) so to complete the picture I plugged in an old idea I had floating around, which is that there are different critics with contradictory aesthetics who judge your painting, and you try to construct things that please enough of them to get by. As it turned out, painting is not that fun as a minute-to-minute activity. It's hard work to make anything good (just like in real life). To some extent this could be mitigated by providing a more sophisticated array of painting tools, but that would also steepen the learning curve for the game, which I didn't want. Still, I think the other parts of the game work pretty well (the critics, etc), and as Casey suggests in the email conversation below, if it could be transplanted to a game where the minute-to-minute activity of the player isn't such hard work, that could be very interesting. How to Play ----------- The game proceeds in four distinct stages, which you unlock one-by-one. In the first stage you are just doing freeform painting, to get used to the interface. Every time you click the "Finish This Painting" button, the completed painting goes into your Portfolio and you start a fresh one. After you have finished two paintings, you can click "Find a Patron" and unlock the 2nd part of the game, in which you are given tasks of copying famous paintings. Here I wanted to provide a very clear goal that was easy to understand, but also was not too easy to be great at. The better you do at copying the painting, the more you get paid for it. (Though the comparison algorithm used to judge you during this phase is kind of wacky, so sometimes you might score higher than you really ought to, especially for bad copies). It's impossible to have a painting copy completely rejected, unless you put so little paint on the canvas that it's obvious you weren't actually trying to succeed. After doing two of these paintings, you unlock the next section. Again in this part of the game you copy paintings, but they are less illustrious works, and the emphasis is on speed -- you want to do what you can within 1-2 minutes. The faster you finish (and the higher-quality the copy), the more you get paid. Here I wanted to try and encourage the player to get a lot looser / messier / more-freeform with what they are doing through the rest of the game. It's unclear how well that succeeds, though. After doing two speedpaintings, you unlock the galleries, which is the final section and the real meat of the game. There are a number of art galleries taking submissions from painters like you; each gallery has a board of directors who will judge your work, and those directors have widely different (and often conflicting) ideas of what they want. Because the art world is so incestuous, each director serves on the boards of several different galleries. At first your goal is to figure out what each director wants; when you make a painting that really hits at the core of one of their likes or dislikes, that like/dislike is revealed to you on the director's portfolio screen. After you have a good enough idea about what the various critics like, you can start making paintings that you think will please enough of them, and get your work accepted at each gallery. Note: To pay Mario, you need $1000 in cash. You can run the game with the -cash option to start with $10000. Or you can run with the -unlock option to start with $10000 and have all modes unlocked. Email about this game among early playtesters: --------------------------------------------- As part of an ongoing email conversation, I wrote (on 22 January 2006): The interesting part of the game is once you unlock the 3rd button on the main screen... the other stuff is basically warmup for that, and stuff that is conceptually easier. You can run the game with -unlock if you want to skip to that part, but it only takes 2 paintings for each of the other two buttons to get there. The only way to totally fail a painting is if you don't have enough paint strokes (which is about 20 or so). For what it's worth the judging doesn't care hugely about color right now. (Obviously the color is a big issue currently, and I think it's funny that the first painting it gives you is a person, when there is no skin-tone-colored paint). Definitely working on the actual action of painting would be like 35% of the work on this project. What's in there right now is just enough for the prototype. --------------- Casey Muratori wrote (on 23 January 2006): >> Definitely working on the actual action of painting would be like 35% of the work >> on this project. What's in there right now is just enough for the prototype. Yeah, my high-level comment is that the metagame kind of looked interesting (art critics critique me and so forth, and I pander to them), but the actual low-level gameplay was extremely tedious and unrewarding, so I just didn't want to play. I'm not sure if that's a fundamental aspect of painting on a computer (it's not fun), or if it's just a matter of having a really great looking / feeling brush with a 3D brush actually drawn on with spreading bristles and a painting sound and all that and then it's satisfying. --------------- I replied (on 23 January 2006): At the same time I don't know that it would be enough to carry this into "great game" territory. There is still the issue that it's a batch process (paint for a while, then see how people rated it), and we were talking sometime a while ago about how batch processes are kind of hostile to all but a small number of people (e.g. Bridge Builder). One option is to make it less like real-life painting, and somehow provide sub-goals to pursue during the painting process (i.e., little "inspiration targets" pop up once in a while, like, there ought to be a big bright thing over here, and if you do that before the target fades, you get some kind of bonus. etc.) Another one would be to provide active feedback while you are painting. [An interesting start to the game might be a coloring book color-by-numbers thing where people are trying to influence / bribe you in contradictory ways about how to color it. But in that kind of scheme I think information overload might be a hard thing to deal with.] --------------- Chris Hecker wrote (on 23 January 2006): I was thinking a realtime hot-cold type thing might be cool when I was doing it. --------------- Casey Muratori wrote (on 23 January 2006): >> One option is to make it less like real-life painting It would be pretty sweet if there was like a 3D model, and stuff, that you were looking at, who was posing, and then you "painted" on your canvas but it totally helped you paint really well. So it was like, you do a stroke and it totally nudges it around and colors it properly and everything. It would make people feel like they were really good painters :) I know that is completely unrelated to your game and isn't constructive at all, but I just thought it was cool. A more related thing: like I said before, I think there is a strong metagame in there, that you have working. Everyone thinks art critics are stupid and the things they say are stupid, and it's all whatever, and you're kind of making fun of that, and it feels great. The problem is the painting. So what if we could do a game that's that metagame but without the painting problem? The thing I was thinking about was modern sculpture. That's a much more simple and quick thing. The person can click on the 3D teacup, place it, drop in the tampon, and then title it. It would take only 30 seconds or so to make your art piece, which drastically reduces the "batchiness". This also feels a lot less investmenty. With the painting, it's going to take you like 5+ minutes at least to paint anything at all, even a big smeary canvas with no detail. You don't want to be told that your painting sucks after that. But with the sculpture thing, it's kind of more of a joke, really, so the player's thinking more "what can I put together that will totally snow these people". With the painting, it actually feels more like you would feel if you were a real artist, which is that you worked hard on something and some twat loser decides they don't like it and somehow their opinion is important. Etc., etc.