PROBABLY ART — That’s the name of the project I’ve been working on for the past 6 months. It’s a video game that’s not supposed to be a game. More precisely, it’s a virtual art exhibition with gaming elements. I’ve intentionally minimized the gaming aspects as much as possible to focus more on the artworks. 

The game is already finished and playable here on itch.io. Since I didn't made a devlog during development, I'd like to use this "Making of" to give some insight into the creation of PROBABLY ART.

You can play the finished game here: https://schauermann.itch.io/probably-art

Trailer

# Check if the player likes the game 
if likes_game:     
print("If you like my creation, please like and comment on the PROBABLY ART game page. Thank you! :)")

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I create digital art and have already made several attempts to make it interactively accessible.

Here, you get a glimpse of how it all began. You see both the artwork…

and my efforts to add interaction to it.

The game concept is quite simple. Move around and you’ll hear music. Interact with the environment to add more melodies to the music.

I’m not a programmer. What you just saw took me 1.5 months to create. I’m pretty slow, right? However, I didn’t have to write a single line of code for it. It was all done in Construct 3, which allows for a kind of visual scripting. It simplifies things a lot, but it can still be challenging in many ways, at least for me. 

What I learned from this small test sequence, I was able to apply effectively to PROBABLY ART.

Why this project?

Visual art has always fascinated me, but I’ve noticed it can feel distant compared to music and movies, which instantly evoke emotions. Engaging with a painting requires willingness and sometimes takes time. That made me somewhat sad, knowing that we live in a fast-paced time with short attention spans. I wanted to counteract the idea that my art is just a fleeting moment while scrolling through social media timelines. I wanted to find a way to present my art in a way that ideally makes people stop and feel something when they look at it.

Sometimes I think the reason why I create art is that I can evoke the inspiring feeling in someone else that my favorite artists evoke in me. Simply put, I want to create a space where there’s an opportunity to see my art the way I do.

You just witnessed my tangled thought process, but it’s because of these thoughts that PROBABLY ART came into being.

Sneak Peek

It’s challenging to show a lot of in-game footage without spoiling everything, given the game’s playtime of 20–40 minutes. In the image above, you see a slightly altered version of an in-game screenshot though. As you can see, what was once a top-down game has transformed into a 2D platformer. Something else I can share is that the little blue guy in the middle is the playable main character. Wow! Quite a lot of information at once! Haha.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had the idea to make my art interactive. Being an ambitious dreamer, I immediately drew inspiration from major video game titles. Little did I know, this would lead to some challenges later on.

I immersed myself in games like Limbo, Inside, Journey, Celeste, Night in the Woods, and many others. (Work can be fun sometimes!) These are all exceptional games that I highly recommend. Until this point, I hadn’t played many games, except during my childhood and the occasional new Zelda title every six years. I quickly realized that video games are a unique form of art. In my opinion, some games should be displayed in galleries as art pieces.

Fueled by this inspiration, I started working. I had big visions but no concrete plan. This resulted in months of obsessing over the game’s plot, day and night. Sometimes, I had trouble sleeping because the game constantly occupied my thoughts. Dreaming big is motivating and helps me push through the daunting tasks ahead. However, it can also be disheartening when you realize your goals might be out of reach.

I’ve worked with the Construct 3 game engine many times before. It allows for game development without needing programming knowledge. I designed a small house where the game would begin. The main character could explore the house and interact with various objects. A cat would tell you it was hungry, and the TV would play commercials when interacted with. I created the background music in Ableton. As you can see, there is also a Schauermann painting hanging in the house. The working title at the time was "Mom Said I’m Special." I like the title because it has a nice double meaning. On one hand, it can truly convey the sentiment of a loving mother. On the other hand, it could imply there’s something a bit quirky or peculiar about the character.

The early stages of the game were very text-heavy. However, I realized that my English wasn’t good enough to write authentic dialogues. (You might have noticed this already, or maybe not — thanks to AI 😀). So, I had to rethink my approach. By this point, three weeks had already passed. I decided to keep dialogues to a minimum in my game. This was just the beginning of frequently discarding ideas.

I’ll share how things progressed in the next post.

Game development is hard. If you choose this path, be prepared for your project to haunt you day and night. It takes a lot of discipline to stay on track and consumes an enormous amount of time. I’m not someone who makes a lot of plans. I usually just dive in and see where it takes me. In the case of my game called PROBABLY ART, this approach proved to be my downfall.

I had visions of creating an extraordinary game with a mystical atmosphere and a story that unfolds without any dialogue. The playtime was supposed to be about two hours, and my digital paintings would be on full display without hindering the narrative. I had big ambitions.

The visuals came together relatively quickly. My goal was to bring the style I use in my digital paintings into the game. They were intentionally cute to contrast with a darker storyline.

The Story: A Depressed Rabbit

The story stuck with me the most throughout the day, making it hard to switch off. In the game, I wanted to tell the story of a depressed character in a rabbit costume. I deliberately didn’t give “the rabbit” a name so players could more easily project themselves onto the main character. The rabbit’s past is explored in an abstract way, with time jumps between childhood and the present. It’s about home, which can be a place of comfort or a cage you’re too scared to leave, preventing you from having new experiences. That’s a small fragment of the story and how it begins. Themes of self-love and self-hatred were supposed to play major roles in the story. Everything was meant to be told ambiguously, leaving room for player interpretation.

The Ninety-Ninety Rule

Creating the visual aspects of the game was relatively easy compared to the rest. The Ninety-Ninety Rule kept popping into my head: “The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the remaining 90%.” The first 90% was the fun part — the game was almost playable, and the music was done. But everything you don’t see — the last 10% — like bug fixes, game logic, and so on, took as long as the first 90%. All the background work that a game needs overwhelmed me. And, honestly, it was sometimes boring. Days would pass before I could fix a tiny bug. But I learned a lot, and after four months, I had my first prototype. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, the project was still called “Mom Said I’m Special” at that point.

The whole style, with the old Windows desktop look, was meant to evoke nostalgia and childhood memories. As mentioned, the game often switches between past and present. You can also tell what time period you’re in by the color of the rabbit. As the game progresses, there will be more flashbacks, making the time jumps more understandable. I created the music in Ableton, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

You can probably imagine how hard it was for me to abandon the project prematurely. Four months of work for 5 minutes of gameplay. Completing the game would have taken me another 2 years. If I’m honest, I was already at my wit’s end by that point, but I didn’t want to give up entirely. So, I decided to think a bit smaller, and thus the idea for my new project, PROBABLY ART, was born.

Stay tuned for the next blog post to find out what happens next.

After 4 months of working on a game that would need at least another year, I decided to start a new project due to time constraints. It was a tough decision, but I’ve learned a lot and was able to use many elements from the previous game.

Player Movement

For example, I previously spent two weeks making sure the main character felt good to control. It was a bit crazy since I spent hours each day just watching this character and its animations. When does the body stretch? When does it squash? How long should it all take, especially in combination with the jump height?

I moved the character around in a level with no background or other elements until it felt right to me. This included fine-tuning the acceleration and speed. I wanted to avoid any unexpected behavior, like the main character failing to jump upon landing even when the jump button was pressed. Initially, this happened often because if the player pressed the jump button just before landing, the jump wouldn’t trigger since the main character hadn’t yet touched the ground. I allowed the player to jump just slightly before landing to solve this.

Coyote Time

When jumping off the edge of a platform, I implemented “coyote time,” a term I was unfamiliar with until then. Inspired by the cartoon series Road Runner, where the coyote often runs off cliffs and hangs in the air for a few seconds before falling, I implemented something similar in the game. If the player runs off the end of a platform, they can still jump for a very short time during the fall, even though the platform is no longer being touched. This is meant to assist the player and improve their experience.

A small animation signaling that you are at the edge of the platform, of course, could not be missing.

These and other things were already completed and ready to be implemented in the new game.