Starry Night Experiment

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Synopsis:

A game made entirely in eight hours. I had wanted to implement a touchscreen-based interface (with a stylus and a USB-based touchscreen I had recently acquired), but it also works fairly well with a standard mouse.

The backstory is this: you are Van Gogh, and you are painting a masterpiece. You can visualize the final work in your mind, and the painting tells you what brushstrokes to draw next. But beware: if you make a mistake or take too long, the painting in your mind will get angry. Get too far behind, and it's game over.

Tech:

This game features a variety of tech, from the randomly generated brushstrokes to the split-channel drawing, and an animated introduction screen. It uses the sol(py) engine as a base.

The brushstrokes were created using the sol(py) animation framework. SNEx generates random paths within a range of widths and heights, then iterates over the entire animation path and stores the points into a list. A simple point-vs-circle collision scheme was used to insure the player remained on-path.

To get the split-image visual effect, the background is drawn three times, each one affecting an independent channel (in R,G,B). I used the red channel to indicate current "health" - as you get bogged down, the red drains from the image. All three channels jitter independently when you draw off the path or make a mistake, which created a very interesting visual effect.

Team:

Greg Lane (Me)

Vincent van Gogh

Gameplay Video:

Requirements:

Python 2.5 (cross platform, Mac and Windows)

Pyglet 1.1 (included in game download)

A mouse w/ left-click, or a touchscreen interface that maps to this.