Hey all, I’m Sodoj and I made Commutator, a snake game you can play in your Microsoft Paint window!

One of the reasons I decided to do this game is that I unironically love using Microsoft Paint! While it is very limiting compared to contemporary drawing software like Krita and Photoshop, working around those limitations is extremely fulfilling and every drawing feels much more meaningful!

Here's one drawing I managed to conjure up in Paint. The guy's lantern isn't shining all that bright so maybe you could help him light it up. Who knows, there might be something hidden in the darkness:

Using Paint as a drawing tool is one thing, but using it for game creation is even bigger challenge. In fact, this is not my first time using Paint in game development, my entry for Ludum Dare 50, Darko, had all of its 2D assets drawn in Paint. Organizing texture atlases and making their backgrounds transparent was a pain and a half, but I think it was worth it, mostly because I had so much fun doing the assets!

Making the entire game revolve around MSPaint window was much more tricky. To my knowledge, there isn't really a way to render an image to MSPaint canvas and all of that fancy stuff, there's only stuff that make MSPaint MSPaint: brushes that you use with the mouse, canvas size, colors and the fact that it's on every Windows 10 OS. Not may compelling games you could make with that toolset, some might say not at all, but with some creative thinking everything is possible.

These days I'll be going more in depth about how I managed to make this game. What I want you to take from this post, if anything, is no matter what tools you use, there's a potential in all of them to make something incredible!

If you want to try out Commutator, you can find it here .