SA GameDev Competition 9: The Rage of Painting Design Document

This space is reserved for ideas and drafts for my entry into this year’s Awful Game Dev competition. The theme? Public Access Television.

I am easily amused and quick to jump on terrible ideas.

It’s an amusing take on Bob Ross and everyone loves Bob Ross.
It doesn’t require lots of realtime physics or math-heavy operations.
It gives me a chance to stretch my algorithmic skills in Java, as almost all image processing algorithms I’ve written so far have been in Python.
It doesn’t require very many art assets. Despite being a show about art, it’s pretty light on that front.

The game is broken up into stages or ‘episodes’.
Each episode has the user drawing a picture, and pictures increase linearly in difficulty and complexity.
Knob Ross opens each episode by showing the image to be completed.
Ross runs through the steps for painting it.
Ross shows the finished image again and the countdown timer starts.
At the end of each episode, Knob Ross will compare the image the user has drawn to the objective image and give it a score.
New episodes are unlocked by having the sum scores from the previous episodes greater than a threshold.
Stretch goal: In the Android version, it would be nice to snap a photo of someone/something and have Ross paint it.
Stretch goal: User upload gallery.

A. We will need to display Ross with some animations, text for his speech, and the image to be drawn.
B. We will need to read mouse input from the user, including palette selection, brush strokes, and ‘finish’ buttons.
C. We will need a countdown timer to prevent dilly-dallying on the user’s behalf.
D. We will need to play sounds for his speech and some background music.
E. We will need a menu system to select episodes.
F. We will need systems to load an image, convert it to n colors, decompose it into steps, and compare it to the user’s image.

No idea. Gotta’ fill out this.

—Joseph's Blog