Biweekly, Itch.io hosts a game jam with a new theme and limitation with a 72 hour time limit. This ongoing format allows creators to constantly be involved with jams, and places a little less emphasis on restrictions. It's a casual event, that allows people to really explore new ideas.
This years jam theme was Colors! The limitation was "You are your own enemy".
*ethan* | ethanbaedke.itch.io
UnderLeaves | https://soundcloud.com/underleaves
Lead - Donuts | https://dribbble.com/nick-lee
Lydia Chamberlain | milk#3000 - UI/UX Design
Lydia Chamberlain | milk#3000 - UI/UX Design
I designed, created assets for, and implemented the UI (which you can see all assets later in this page) as well as the art + animation for the slimes, the tilesets, and various promotional graphics. I also designed and implemented 3 of the 4 levels.
Paint Boy discovers paint world! Adventure through dangerous levels to find the exit.
In Paint Boy, you play as Paint Boy looking to find his way out of the paint dimension. He must utilize his paint powers to defeat enemies and traverse the landscape. Be careful - his powers are limited! If you run out of paint, it's game over.
For this jam, we chose to use paint as a vehicle for color. As for the limitation, your abilities cost - health, so you must use them at your own risk! You can replenish your health via blobs throughout the levles.
We had many fantastic ideas throughout the jam, but of course time was our enemy - we hope to work on Paintboy more in the future!
Check out this Paint Boy speedrun, completed by my friend!
The following UI artifacts I implemented myself in Unity, with the help of Ethan to make it all work! My approach for the UI was to keep it paint themed, utilizing skeuomorphic design. Because we were doing pixel art, I also decided to do all UI in pixel style as well to keep consistency throughout the game. Many assets didn't make it into the game, but I'll go through them here!
My idea was that Paint boy is made of paint - so what better to represent that as than a Paint Tube? I created a standard health bar with "paint" as the slider, to give it a little more quirkiness.
While the attack buttons were the most unrelated to paint, I wanted them to feel clearly like pressable buttons. The labels should clearly say what keybind they're tied to, all at a glance. I took some inspiration from old Mega man graphics for the abilites themselves! From left to right is Homing attack, paint bomb, and dash.
This is where I started to enjoy playing around with paint ideas. The Pause menu replicates paint swatches you'd commonly find at home paint stores. And yes, the hexcodes match the color!
If I could work further on this, I'd love to add specific hover/focus states, make the text MORE readable as a button, and add sound effects for more audio feedback.
While we didn't have time to implement this feature, I was thinking about ways to make a "book" of enemies you could keep track of and learn more about. While scouring paint-related images, I was reminded of water color palettes - and how perfectly they could work with enemies in each square! I spent a lot of time crafting the UI background, but alas, it didn't see the light of day.
Because of the scope of what we wanted to create and the timeline at hand, I assisted in a number of art assets so that the lead artist could focus on animations for Paint Boy!
Originally, the slimes would drop useful items for paint boy, so I designed them as a slime with a "soul", having pink emanating from the center. Even though we pivoted, the paint aesthetic still worked with our final direction.
I made the the most efficient tileset I could within the timeframe that could be used to both enclose the level and provide platforms. I created 3 out of the 4 levels within unity using my tileset pieces, which included walls, platforms, small grass decorations, and spikes.
While Paint Boy may not become fleshed out, I gained valuable, practical experience in designing, crafting, and implementing UI for pixel based games. It was a wonderful exercise and I am so pleased with what we accomplished in 72 hours!
