The Painter

In The Painter, you play as a white bunny inside of paintings jumping between them as you explore what has happened in the world of the Painter.

The Painter is a narrative experience based on minimalistic gameplay mechanics where the main goal was to bring forth the narrative and base the game as a narrative experience.

Key Learning

Managed to learn how to follow through with the Narrative design and implement it into the gameplay and world.
I got a better understanding and learned how to work with both the 3D and 2D artists to create the world and environment of each painting.
Learned how to effectively block out a 3D world that would be played in a 2D manner.

Personal Contribution

Level Design I designed two of the five levels did the block-out, testing, and polishing of each of those levels.
I worked on the narrative document that was used during the production of the game from beginning to end.
I Designed the narrative for the game and how we could impliment it into the game.

Genre

Narrative, platformer.

Platform
PC.

Tools

Unity

Visual Studios

Unity - Github

Production Time

7 weeks.

Team size

11 students.

3 Game Designers.

3 Programers.

3 3D Artists.

3 2D Artists.

Role

Level designer - Narrative designer.

Contribution

The Narrative stroy, Level design.

Swedish Game Awards

SGA

Nominated for Narrative design 2019.

Screenshots

Narrative Design

I worked mainly on the Narrative design in the Painter where we not only used the environment outside the painting to relay the Narrative but also what was within the paintings.

This was done by introducing the player to the outside narrative first but in the wrong order and then making the player relive it in the right order and armed with the Narrative they find within the paintings.

Narrative in the world

In the Painter, we used props, black color splatters, paintings and music to relay the Narrative and create an atmosphere that invokes a feeling of sadness or uneasy in the player.

I wanted to give the player early evidence that something is wrong in this place and give create a tense atmosphere with the black splatters on the walls, smeared faces in the paintings and morbid art to make the player question themselves "what is going on here"

Here as well we wanted to show that even tho the entire studio is in discovery with black splatters everywhere and the faces in the paintings smeared out this one wall and painting has not been touched. This was made to indicate that this person is important in some way.

Narrative red thread

In the Painter I made sure that a red thred would be followed throughout the game by showing it to the player inside paintings and inbetween them.

We did this by having the story get revealed as the player, played through the game revealing it as the player removed more and more of the black ink

Removing the black ink, the paintings would come to life each ink splash bringing something new back to the painting with the final one returning it to its original state.

The layout

We used the paintings in two different ways in the game

1 Game worlds you could walk in.
2 Story paintings you would only see.

Both types of paintings had Narrative story in them but the way we represented it was different, the game world paintings had a more player interaction narrative where they would walk around and find the narrative actively.

The Story Paintings had a more visual narrative to them that the player would only see for a few seconds as they jumped between paintings.

Love

Death

On this wall, the Gameworld would have the player discover two people having a romantic time on a bridge and in the next painting the same people but now with a child.

The story paintings in between those two paintings show the couple dressed for a marriage and a baby child filling in the gaps between the game world paintings.

The idea of the paintings used in the game was to relay strong emotions by using the music and visual Narrative in the paintings.

Here close to the end right after a game world painting showing the player the man from the first painting now alone in a graveyard followed by many morbid and dark paintings to indicate death, loss, and insanity to the player as the painter lost everything.

Level Design

When working on the level design for The Painter we created all levels in as a 3D world that got flattened out into a 2D world that we then streamed onto a canvas of each painting where the game takes place.

This meant that when working on the level design we had to think a lot about how we placed things, the angle of them and the theme of the paintings.

When creating this level I wrote down on paper what story it would have, what the center piece would be and the layout of the path the player would walk.

The most important thing I had to remember was how it would look like in-game. I wanted to add depth to the levels and did so by creating a path that overlapped itself to make this level feel less like a straight line path and more exploratory.

When creating the path the player could take we had 2 different types of movement we could use.

Normal Movement: This movement only went from left to right and was used the most for the player taking them from one side of the painting to the other.

Spline Movement: The spline movement was used to give us the level designers the freedom to move the character deeper into the painting to create more interesting level design and movement paths the player could take.

CV

Jesper Bentzer