Brush Hour

Welcome to the world of Brush Hour 

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a painter during the Romantic era. It is your sole responsibility to make the king happy. And he does not like bad things. So, you better be good at removing them with your trusty brush. You will start by reimagining the real world into a romanticised version of it by applying our handcrafted shader. As you enjoy the new view, small parts of reality, like an old and rotten tree, will seep through and start corrupting the illusion you created for the king. Keep the corruption at bay and your life intact. Good Luck.

During this game, you will therefore be led through the moral dilemma of hiding reality to satisfy the king, while also lying to all those who will view your art (and yourself) or losing the game. This gives you the unique position of reliving how culture and art were created during the Romantic era. It also showcases that while you have freedom in art, the style you paint in is still dictated by those around you, which results in whether you can keep your job or not. The narrator also praises the player for obscuring negative things. This may make the player think about the impact of art, but also of the news on those who view it. It is used as a way to influence what people think. The painter exaggerates the positivity and perfection of reality, which is a type of propaganda of the past. As a result, it may encourage the player to reflect critically about how art is created today and what its purpose is. 

Team Reflection

In general, we are quite happy with how it all turned out. The tasks were shared equally among us, some more technical - some more creative. Even though the given methods helped guiding us along, we relied a lot on our own thoughts and ways during more stressful times. The rather short development period - for an AR game - resulted in a lot cutting features we originally wanted to implement, but we still ended up with a satisfying prototype. This has also been confirmed by the playtest and user evaluation during the EXPO, where we mainly got positive feedback, approving the game idea and affirming that it is fun. 

We found the game jam methods Culture Safari, Culture Change and Culture Storming to be useful since they sparked idea generation and discussions about how these ideas could be implemented. These methods also allowed us to refine the ideas.

We did not find Empowered Participation useful because we were a team of three people in a project, where everybody had to do some of everything. Dividing up into distinct roles did not make as much sense given the short time frame, where we needed to have all hands on deck to finish on time.

AR Interaction Design

Our game is about painting reality. Performing the brush strokes is quite literally augmenting reality. The core interaction allows players to wield their controller as if it were an extension of a painter's arm from the Romantic era. As they sweep the brush across their real-world environment - captured by the passthrough camera - that specific portion of reality seamlessly transforms into a Romantic painting.