The Painter's Cat by Arcana

[raw]
made by Arcana for LD26 (COMPO)
A game inspired by Mondrian and by my cat Timmy.

This is my first Ludum Dare, my first time using Python for anything more than 300 lines of code, my first time using PyGame, and my first time building a game since I was 15.

This was really excruciating. And a lot of fun. I hope someone out there enjoys the game... I thought it was a difficult progress. Much respect to people who do this multiple times every year.

(Edited to fix an issue where the Mac binary wouldn't run as a ZIP archive... I changed it to a tar.gz. Edit 2 to upload a Windows binary archive.)

Ratings

Coolness 60% 3
Overall 3.26 457
Audio 3.85 47
Fun 2.82 700
Graphics 3.00 569
Humor 2.96 187
Innovation 3.64 176
Mood 3.33 219
Theme 3.87 265

Feedback

hdon
29. Apr 2013 路 10:24 UTC
I got this game to run on GNU/Linux. You'll need to have Python, Pygame, and numpy installed. Download and extract the "Source" download. In the "painterscat" directory, you'll need to patch painterscat.py, removing the line "import pygame._view" then just run python painterscat.py

It was a little hard to figure out how to play. I died six times in a row less than a second after the game started. I survived a while, finally, by holding down space before I saw my cat. Avoid the colored squares!
mtrc
29. Apr 2013 路 16:53 UTC
Liked this a lot - runs lovely on my Macbook by the way - I enjoyed the musical beats from bisecting the world a lot, too. I wish it didn't close when you died! I wanted to reattempt it right away. Played it a few times though, really enjoyed it. Well done!
ananasblau
29. Apr 2013 路 16:53 UTC
nice title. I have an old comic book with 101 Things To Do With A Dead Cat. Not like that's related. And then I died the first time. Oh well. Ha Ha.

Controlling with the mouse (Haha, control the cat with a mouse) isn't working that great, but if you take this to mobile it might be perfect on touch devices. Great music. You got a whole bunch of single notes in you data, how cool is that?
馃帳 Arcana
29. Apr 2013 路 20:49 UTC
Yeah, the pygame._view line was a Mac OS X and py2app oddity. I had to remove it to get the Windows build to work. Thanks for verifying!

The mouse control is spotty unfortunately (if you cross the mouse from one end of the screen to the other you'll teleport!)

I should have submitted instructions in the post, or built them into the game. Lesson learned for next time!

The objective is to "bound" the coloured squares on all four sides with your paint - if you haven't tried doing that until now, then try that to see what happens. :)

I'll be back to try out each of your games soon!
richtx
30. Apr 2013 路 04:04 UTC
I really liked this one. Very innovative. How did you get that level of music done? One of my favorites.
fueelin
30. Apr 2013 路 04:35 UTC
Wild game. Very interesting combination of concepts. Seemed to loose a little too easily, but liked playing around with it regardless.
Dark Acre Jack
30. Apr 2013 路 04:36 UTC
Yay Timmy.
ethankennerly
30. Apr 2013 路 04:44 UTC
You made an interactive Mondrian painting in two days! Genius! If you continue to develop this, I'd be interested in the how the shapes or composition is reviewed. Did I make an interesting composition?
LizEngland
30. Apr 2013 路 04:50 UTC
Ok, this is pretty adorable. A bit too much learn-by-death, but nice once I got the hang of it. I've seen lots of the minimalist painting games around, but making the painting itself is a nice spin on the idea.
Bloated Hippo
30. Apr 2013 路 07:02 UTC
I also noticed the mouse issue.

I like the music and sound effects, painting mechanic and the cat. Well, that's the whole thing haha.

I'd like a replay button after death so you don't have to restart.
馃帳 Arcana
30. Apr 2013 路 14:30 UTC
Can I do a stealth update to add a retry button?
馃帳 Arcana
30. Apr 2013 路 14:59 UTC
All right, I've went ahead and added a "retry" from the ending screen. While it would have been nice to make other changes (especially people dying right after the start!) I think that might overstepping my bounds.

The "source" link now links to pretty old source but it's there for archival purposes. The Github source reflects the latest version.
Misael.K
01. May 2013 路 06:30 UTC
The musical sound effects are lovely, they work so well with this. And of course the game idea is great! The difficulty is fine, although I think it needs to get progressively harder.
I had some problems with the cat position, as he would sometimes make a jump, since I don't know where the mouse is.
Also, more than once I couldn't see my score because of over eagerly pressing space. =P (yeah, some people complain about that they can't restart, and then here I come complaining about the opposite)
But hey, I had a lot of fun with this game. Keep em coming! :D
ecool377
02. May 2013 路 02:50 UTC
Great game would play a full version with some fun stuff added. Needs a goal.
whilefun
02. May 2013 路 02:54 UTC
It took me a few tries to figure it out, but once I did it was really fun! The music and gameplay went together very well I thought. Good stuff :)
Jyrkface
02. May 2013 路 03:10 UTC
Wow. Just outstanding. Excellent take on the theme, my favorite "Mondrian" so far, by far. Top marks in every category, it all fit perfect
mattperrin
02. May 2013 路 03:19 UTC
Note sure why but the cat "Meow" sound effect almost blew out my speakers the first time it played. Haven't had other issues though.
馃帳 Arcana
02. May 2013 路 04:11 UTC
For those asking about the sounds, I composed all three songs in Logic Pro using the Miroslav Philharmonik orchestra plugin. I also used that plugin for the sound effects. The "meow" was a weekend recording from Timmy. Of course. :)
lightnarcissus
02. May 2013 路 04:13 UTC
I like the music and sound effects. Mouse is a little clunky to control with but besides that I'd chart this up as a good effort!
Tanius
02. May 2013 路 04:36 UTC
Lol, i still haven't a clue of what should i do, but i love what i'm doing in this game :D
gmaker
02. May 2013 路 04:59 UTC
really fun! good job
johnfn
02. May 2013 路 05:13 UTC
OHC REPRESENT!

Ha, I really like it! Love the way the music and the art go together, it makes for a very calming and coherent experience. The controls were pretty cool but a little hard to keep track of. I have two suggestions. First, you get ganked by the squares pretty easily, so a warning system would really help. Also I feel like you should have a limited amount of black lines, because eventually you can just fill the whole screen with lines and then any squares that come into existence get insta-ganked.

Anyway it was cool :D
TenTonToon
02. May 2013 路 05:16 UTC
I have mixed feelings on this one.
On one hand, I like the sort of freedom to experiment that it gives you, and it's aesthetically engaging.
On the other hand, I do not like its art for the sake of art vibe. It also has some serious issues with the control and collision detection, basic for a game. But, then again, this is not exactly a game.

I'd like to see this concept further developed, in order to fully grasp what you were aiming for.
Jaime von Schwarzburg
02. May 2013 路 06:24 UTC
I really enjoyed this. The controls were a little off, but the overall experience was strong enough to compensate.
A++ would play again
danblack
02. May 2013 路 06:42 UTC
Good theme and nice looking game. I found the gameplay and controls awkward though.

The gameplay is different from yours but you might want to check out the game Mondrian Provoked(http://www.bigpants.ca/mondrianprovoked/)

Nice one for making your first game in a while. I hope you make more.
noddy2006
02. May 2013 路 07:27 UTC
Difficult controls, but the audio was beautiful. Great stuff!
Ernyz
02. May 2013 路 15:31 UTC
I liked your idea, though moving cat with mouse was very hard until i understood the principles :) music was very nice as well.
ohsqueezy
02. May 2013 路 18:22 UTC
I enjoyed the atmosphere and cat sprite. The design reminds me of Qix :)
dalbinblue
03. May 2013 路 04:40 UTC
Played a few times, highest was 100 second. Death (waking up) hit me way too often by the color blocks spawning right at my position. Other than that nice entry.
PsenFilip
03. May 2013 路 21:21 UTC
Music is good. On top of that the sound effects sound so cool when you are painting.
The controls are OK, the only big problem is that the cat seems to either pop or snap depending on mouse position. It looks unintended and it does get in the way, in a base sense.
Overall good idea and interesting execution.
spilth
05. May 2013 路 16:25 UTC
Tried to play this on my Mac but it wanted me to install X11.
EatenAlive3
08. May 2013 路 19:38 UTC
Nice! The controls with the mouse were a little tough sometimes when I wanted to know where I was. I really loved the music and sound, though! What did you use to make the music?
EggDestroyer
08. May 2013 路 20:55 UTC
This game is a very strange case of "I'm not sure why but I love it !". The controls are odd to me and I can't figure out a real strategy, but you immersed me within a wonderful atmosphere ! I felt a very good mood, maybe because the game sounds and looks peaceful, relaxing, and including a cat dreaming. I liked it so much ! Thank you !
egos
09. May 2013 路 00:17 UTC
nice game
fermcg
09. May 2013 路 03:23 UTC
nice game man! congratulations!
Topaz
12. May 2013 路 03:07 UTC
That was really good. One of the best games I've seen in terms of fitting the theme.

I've heard you can compile PyGame applications for OSX, do you think you could look into my game, or tell me how you do it (I haven't had much luck with anything apart from py2exe).