Colour Your World

Paint yourself and your waifu in this thrilling story! Made in 3 hours!

Controls

Left Mouse	Draw / Shoot
WASD / Arrow Keys / IJKL	Move
R	Restart Game
F11	Toggle Fullscreen (Windows)
Escape	Close Game (Windows)

Instructions

Listen to your friend give important, obviously well-written dialogue. Press "Save" to continue to the next screen.

When prompted, paint your own custom character image and more in the white box using your mouse. Click the colors and numbers in the top-right of the screen to change your brush size and brush color. Paint to your hearts' content!

After you unlock bullets, aim and fire them with the mouse! Be careful not to shoot your friends! Defeat all the enemies!

Development

This game was hobbled together quickly in less than 3 hours using GameMaker Studio 2 for Paint Jam but long this time 2021.

I used almost every modifier challenge for the game jam:

Challenges

These are little optional things you can do to make your life a living hell. Mix and match, but please don't do them all.

• ✔ Make all your own sound effects using only sounds you can make with your mouth. Onomatopoeia recommended.
• ✔ Only use the default MS Paint color palette.
• ❌ Make a 3D game only using flat images. No meshes except for like the world/levels.
• ✔ Use only comic sans for any in-game font.
• ✔ Draw your assets without a drawing tablet.
• ✔ Try to make the title/logo without any real type/font.
• ✔ Draw all of your art with your eyes closed.
• ✔ Only use the pencil tool.
• ✔ No transparencies.

I literally painted all the art with my eyes closed using MS Paint, using a mouse (not a drawing tablet), with all default colors, the pencil tool, and no transparencies. How I specifically did this was I picked a color from the default palette, then I moved the mouse cursor to vaguely the center of my blank image. Then I closed my eyes tight and looked away, and just using my memory and vague approximations of distance using the mouse, I painted everything. I would then open my eyes to pick a new color, vaguely re-center the mouse, and repeat a few times.

I made all the sound effects (the few that I implemented) using only my mouth, but I actually made these sounds for my friend's game for this game jam that he didn't finish and submit, so I recycled some of them.

Notable Feature

This was my first time making a game that allows you to draw your own character images! In GMS2 terms, this involved some basic applications of dynamic surfaces and runtime sprite creation.

I've been wanting to do it for a while now, and while this is of course a very silly bad game and the painting system is incredibly simplistic, it's a solid proof-of-concept for the technical side of it. I could just as easily swap out the "brush" used by the player, have rounded tools, even drawing tools with built-in transparency or directionality like a spray-paint tool or paintbrush tool. It's pretty straight-forward. I could do layers, dynamic dimensions, inherit transparency, an eraser tool, etc. fairly easily from this point. I can envision how to make an undo/redo system as well, but that doesn't sound great as my GMS2 vision of it requires a lot of surfaces stored in memory to achieve it. Not complicated, just a lot of memory. Maybe with buffers it would be better, which is also way more complex. There are more complex things to try even from there, like inverting or rotating a painted image, or trying to smooth out draws flicked across the canvas, which now entail a lot of blank spaces between painted squares. I could approximate between frames to draw a series of images to smooth out, which would work but has issues, but if the drawing tool has transparency, that breaks, so more still to learn.

Regardless, this is an important technical step for me. This same simple implementation could be re-used for a wide variety of purposes, which I'm happy about.