Paint The Wall is a puzzle Game, for Flash, that I’ve been working on.
Game Concept
You’re a painter and decorator, looking to break in to the trade by impressing your new boss. He knows that time is money, and also the quicker the job gets done the quicker you can be drinking tea.
The kettle’s on and you’ve got to get that wall painted before it boils. And try not to waste any paint, it’s one thing the boss really hates, and on the more difficult levels will lose you time off your kettle.
The game borrows a lot from Tetris, each stroke being like a Tetris block, which can be rotated (using the arrow keys, spacebar, or scroll-wheel) and then placed somewhere on the wall.
A feature of the game is that if you paint the outline of a square or rectangle, the blocks inside will automatically paint. So you can aim to paint larger rectangles, but because every stroke must be placed somewhere on the wall, there’s a greater chance that one stroke will break the rectangle. Smaller rectangles are easier to make, but obviously less blocks are automatically painted.
The idea
While looking for game ideas, I realised that there are about 23 million games out there, but despite that I was surprised to find there’s a shortage of games are based on everyday jobs. I decided it was time to fill that gap in the market.
I’d also done a spot of painting myself with help from my good friend Aaron, who is a true professional and really knows his stuff, he showed me there’s a lot of skill involved, and it takes years of practise. The guy is literally an inspiration for us all.
He also did the voice-overs for the game.
Technical Bit
The game is written in Object Oriented ActionScript 3. Using Flex to code, and compiled in Flash.
I used the Model-View-Controller design pattern, which I hoped will allow for good scalability. As I’m not quite sure when this project will be finished, or how far it will go. Keeping a good structure was a very important aspect of the development.
You may have noticed that the paint brush is a 3D object. It was created in Maya (not by myself but by Alex, a lecturer in 3D at my college). I then used the Away3D engine to import the object, and the help of TweenMax to control it’s movements, rotations and camera angels during the game.
Infact, pretty much any movement in the game is done with TweenMax, a really brilliant ActionScript tweening engine.
I also used TimeLineMax to queue tweens one after the other. For example: each time a stroke gets placed it’s actually a combination of several tweens (one for each block) using TimeLineMax.
What’s Next
Well there’s loads more I want to do, but it’s really just a matter of getting the time to do it.
I would really appreciate any feedback, if you have something you want to say about the game let me know.
Here’s a list of what I have planned
- Paint-roller – to sometimes replace the brush, allowing you to paint a whole row in one
- Different colours – Just to make things prettier
- Fire!
- Better graphics/design stuff – my design skills are not really that up to scratch
- Fixing level difficulties – this needs a bit of testing and feedback (from you!)
- High-scores table (which I’ve already developed but need to get the level difficulties right)
- Better ‘first-time painter’ introduction
- More voice-overs from Aaron
Play…
Well if you’re still reading and you haven’t played, I would say it’s time to go painting. Here’s the link:
more voice overs
wonderfull idea!
amazing!