Gaps Between Art - first person painting puzzle game (FrooxArchive #3)

Hello everyone and welcome to another FrooxArchive entry!

This time I dug out a game from early 2013, that was made in roughly 8 days for an OUYA CREATE game jam (yes, that OUYA) - Gaps Between Art. This project was my first “FPS style” game in Unity, as I used to mostly make 2D(ish) games back then and is more of a concept demo, than a polished game, but it features one of my gameplay concepts that I’m quite proud of.

The game is a portal-esque first person game, in which you solve puzzles by painting! This involves painting the right color patterns on cubes to trigger mechanisms, painting the right colors in the world to be picked up by color detector beams or exploiting “censor spheres”, which try to censor specific color, to lure them around the environment to press buttons for you.

The demo features 6 unique levels and simple narrative (totally not inspired by Portal). One thing that I’m particularly proud of is that each level is quite unique and brings new mechanics. My original worry with this idea was that the puzzles would get repetitive and just differ only in patterns you need to make, but I managed to find a number of unique ways to work with this concept and not all of them even made it into this demo.

If you’re interested it might be worth trying the demo out and see if you can figure out the mechanics and solve the puzzles for yourself. There’s even a tiny cinematic ending after the last level, which hinted at a larger storyline I was planning to develop for the game, but that never came to fruition, at least, not yet.

Full Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqNIc0H860Y

The original was made for the OUYA console. I was quite interested in it back then, because it was around time I wanted to get into game console development with my games, but ended up hitting walls. For example Xbox 360’s indie development program wasn’t available in the Czech Republic at all and I spent some time trying to figure out how to apply from another country, before giving up.

When OUYA appeared, I was quite excited, as it was a promise of a game console without silly regional restrictions and barriers for entry, but unfortunately it didn’t end up catching on and it’s just part of history.

For the Patreon release, I’ve fixed up a few things (though mostly preserved the original demo and its… lack of polish) and added mouse and keyboard controls, so you can try the demo out on your PC, without needing a gamepad (or the console).

The demo managed to score a nomination for “Most Surprising” award in the CREATE game jam and even though it didn’t manage to win it, this made me very happy back then, as it was the first game jam I ever participated in and it encouraged me to do more games. Plus it got me one of the translucent OUYA prototypes as a prize!

https://web.archive.org/web/20131209052505/http://www.killscreendaily.com/create/

I continued developing this project further that year as one of my VR games for the DK1. This didn’t get quite far, as I mostly ended up re-implementing core mechanics of the game (10 day crunch in the game jam doesn’t lend itself to a very pretty code), but eventually switched to developing SightLine for the Oculus VR jam later that year.

If you’d be curious to see some of the prototypes and mechanics in action, here’s a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNbXVEtpCg&list=PLoAvz0_U4_3wK20_ZCWdgyNeLETybOsMj

One of the ideas that I was floating around is that most levels will be made from the cubes, with the gameplay elements attached to them. Those cubes would assemble around the user as level starts and disassemble as they finish, with a small area that remains between the two levels. You can see that in action in the playlist above.

The goal of that was to essentially make the level transitions feel “cool”, especially with things zooming around you in VR and feeling like the entire environment is being reassembled - something that can’t really exist in reality, but gives you a kind of “wow, this is physically impossible” feel - a concept that SightLine and my other VR projects share in different ways.

For now this gameplay concept is something that remains just this small, old demo, but it’s definitely something I’d love to return to and explore more in depth in the future, hopefully as a part of a larger virtual world, with the ability to build the levels from inside of VR. But that’s something for down the road (likely years from now) and I don’t want to spoil anything!

Desktop controls:

Movement - WASD + Mouse

Grab cube - Right Mouse Button

Rotate grabbed cube - Mouse scroll wheel (vertical), Q & E (horizontal)

Shoot paint (once equipped) - Left Mouse Button

Switch equipped paint color - Alphanumeric 1 and 2

Exit to lobby - Double tap Esc