Paintings

January 2019

Paintings is an exploration/puzzle game set in the bedroom of a bad dream. The game was a result of a home-made game jam where I created a game together with one more person during a 72 hour period. The theme for the jam was randomized between past Ludum dare themes, and it ended up being the theme of Ludum dare 37: "one room".

Design

In the game, the player wakes up in his/her bedroom and finds the only door to be locked. The player needs to examine the room and traverse through the different paintings that can be found on the walls in order to find the key that opens the door.

We wanted to create a mysterious atmosphere in the game and give the player an uneasy feeling while simultaneously making him/her interested in the mysteries that are hidden in the room. Instead of creating pure logic puzzles, we wanted the game to be more about exploring the different mechanics and trying things out. The different paintings in the room alternated the game rules in different ways (such as shrinking the player or turning the room upside down) - and the idea was to try and make the player eager to experiment with these paintings in order to find out ways to proceed in the game.

A full walkthrough of the game is displayed in the video below

Personal Responsibilities

There was no clear division of responsibility between me and my jam partner. We both worked on coding the game, building the level together, and helped each other out when required. In summary, I worked on the following things with the game:

Ideating and developing the game concept
Designing game mechanics
Designing parts of the level
Creating models for the game
Scripting game mechanics in unity

Learning Experience

The project gave me new knowledge and competence in the following areas:

Planning, structuring, working on and finalizing a game project in the context of a game jam
Building 3D games in Unity
Communicating design ideas to others than myself and getting to a consensus on design decisions
Producing something under the pressure of a strict deadline.

Tools used

I used the following tools in the project:

Unity (building and coding the actual game)
Blender (models)
Adobe Illustrator (textures, such as the floor)