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[AD1337]

Painters Guild is a simulation game about managing a guild of painters: hire artists, teach them, make paintings, sell them, buy furniture, and stuff...

Steam Page

Official Site

Promotional art.

It is being made by me in Flash, my friend Morvan will make the music like in all my games (even though he doesn't know yet).

In-game gif:




Gameplay soon™.

[mushbuh]

posting for tracking  u  

[Zeredek]

That's cool. How will you handle drawing the paintings themselves?

[AD1337]

posting for tracking   u  

Woah! Cool!

That's cool. How will you handle drawing the paintings themselves?

Not sure yet! For their visual look I'm thinking of randomizing them somehow. As for the gameplay, you just drag the artists in front of the canvas and they paint it.



Original first post:

Mockup:



Prototype:

Grid, character movement by dragging and grid snapping:


Replaced prototype graphics with mockup ones:

[melos]

hooray! looking forward to it.

[AD1337]

hooray! looking forward to it.

Thank you!

I have figured out the gameplay. It will be like tetris mixed with match-3 except completely different. That is the core mechanic, making paintings. Player interaction will be moving these artists around the screen to make them paint, study, rest, mix paints and stuff.

[AD1337]

Trying out isometric tiles.



I agree iso has a lot more potential to look good, but it brings more problems to my poor coding skills and makes the art take more time. I would certainly go for iso if I wasn't a solo dev, but I gotta consider my limitations.

[AD1337]

Progress: An artist painting.

[s0]

I agree iso has a lot more potential to look good, but it brings more problems to my poor coding skills and makes the art take more time. I would certainly go for iso if I wasn't a solo dev, but I gotta consider my limitations.

there are also potential readability problems that would have to be sorted out. just go with zelda style mixed perspectives.

anyway, looks good, will be watching.

[AD1337]

there are also potential readability problems that would have to be sorted out. just go with zelda style mixed perspectives.

anyway, looks good, will be watching.

Yep. I'm glad I decided to stick with normal tiles, this is complicated enough. It's funny you mentioned Zelda, I had just added some Link to the Past and Minish Cap indoors screenshots to my references folder for this project. Thanks!

Now supporting multiple sized paintings (1x1, 1x2, 3x4...). Need to make them look that way now.

[AD1337]

Big paintings now display that way.

[AD1337]

Painters Guild: several artists working on the same painting. Now to make them combo.

[AD1337]

Working on combos, if the icon is the same, they will be removed and the painting will get a bonus (sort of like in match-3 games).

[AD1337]

Testing combos in the case of varying artist progress rates (faster and slower artists). It looks a bit messy and might not work well.

[AD1337]

Trying out varying progress circle speeds. This makes for a complex and hard to predict system. Artists with extreme speed differences are likely to combo more, as the fast circles "pick up" the slow circles on their way. 2 fast artists are likely to never combo. I'm finding it hard to understand how to balance this.

[Rayiner]

It looks awesome!
Will be tracking this one for sure.

[AD1337]

It looks awesome!
Will be tracking this one for sure.

Thanks!

Switching artists around can have a huge impact. It can go from "never combo" to "always 2 combos" right away. In one hand, I like how this can reflect "this guy works better next to that guy", but on the other hand, it's not very intuitive, and requires trial and error instead of being evident.

[AD1337]

Made a collision map so you can't stack artists or put them on top of paintings.

[gimymblert]

track post

[darkhog]

Cool idea. I hope execution will be good too.

For one thing, I'd love to see paintings being procedural instead of few preset ones. True, procedural pictures would be mainly abstract ones, but I'm sure such game would get away with this.