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Bob PicRoss: The Joy of Painting 2's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community Choice | #14 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
A competent Picross implementation blended with television's most calming painter. I played this game for about 40 minutes, so clearly I was engaged. The core mechanics are solid, but overall it could benefit from additional polish and personality.
Liked:
+ Pixel art visuals look great and suit gameplay themes
+ Hilarious concept
+ Competent core gameplayNeeds Work:
- Theme adherence is weak
- Music starts to grate after a few repeats
- Layered painting mechanic doesn't mix well with puzzle gameplayThe use of the theme here is pretty weak. The connection to the original show is clear, but it doesn't add to or strangely mangle the content of the show- it just takes it in a different direction.
As a picross game, I found this fairly fun. The pixel art throughout the interface is lovely, and jives nicely with the gameplay of manually decoding images pixel-by-pixel. The background music, while initially peaceful, started to grate on me after a few repeats. A slow-paced puzzle game like this would really benefit from more variety in the background music.
I have to admit, I didn't have much fun with the "revisit the puzzle in layers" mechanic- being unable to give myself a blank canvas just makes solving the next- completely different- puzzle needlessly confusing. Having the ability to reset a puzzle segment when I've screwed up would have been nice. I also felt the UI could have used more "juice" and feedback. For example, make the continue button change color or pulse when a puzzle is done, and prevent Bob from repeating the same advice on every segment.
Elevator pitch
Solve picross puzzles alongside Bob Ross, the titular host of The Joy of Painting!
Describe how your game adheres to the theme
The game is a spiritual sequel to The Joy of Painting, just in an art puzzle form. And, of course, it's another unnecessary sequel to the many Picross/color nonogram games that exist in the universe.
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Comments
The audio in this was _so good_, that combined with the art made the game feel spot on.
The interface was clear and the puzzle mechanics themselves were well explained. Alas, I'm not terribly good at picross so I couldnt really get past the first puzzle but thats on me more than the game.
Only real issue I can think of is the grey and black indicators are visually too similar to each other.
Pros:
Cons:
Here & There:
I've played far too much Picross over the years, so seeing this and hearing about it got me real excited, even intending to put it off until the end of my jam playthroughs to have time to savour it. I failed to hold out. For the most part this plays like most Picross games and you end up with a pretty little picture by the end of it. The colours can be quite hard to differentiate sometimes though, and being able to erase (especially on remix sections) would be a huge improvement (oh how perfect a right-click erase would be). Also, the numbers at times do not reflect the reality of the puzzle, either not acknowledging that the colours are placed or that they've been removed.
The hungrycat ruleset also strays from what I tend to enjoy about Picross which is the idea that there's never a reason to guess what goes where, it's always flat-out deduction. This ruleset however, in conjunction with random puzzles, does not provide enough information for a single deductive solution mostly because of the collection of non-linked blocks into one number (lets say 4, which can be three different permutations). Because of this and the randomized puzzles resulting in randomized imagery it doesn't feel as satisfying as the base 5 canvases do and so I was yearning for more designed puzzles.
The theme adherence I feel is lacking because it wasn't taken in some new direction, like Bob Ross started to paint some style other than simple landscapes, or the paintings turned out to be puzzles in themselves that carried a narrative or something, or Bob Ross is at home painting in his garage and just talking to some stuffed animals and a rock with a face painted on it. I enjoyed my time with this (barring some specific frustrations), and congrats Klades for getting off the Wall and doing so in style!
Combining two beautiful, perfect things into one even more beautiful and perfecter. I LOVE this game.
This was quite a lovely surprise! The music was soothing, and the Hungry Cat Style Picross rules with multiple colors is a joy.
Dumb idea which I haven't thought through what the gameplay ramifications might be. Bob Ross was famous for using the wet on wet technique, which makes it really easy to blend colors on canvas as everything is obviously still wet. Just keep layering on that paint. Would there be some kind of way to give picross rules that get the player to blend colors somehow? Whether on the canvas or on the palette?
Ohhhh that's a really good idea... What if one of the finished paintings required you to solve it not as four parts of a painting, but in layers? So, the first piece of the puzzle would be the ground work (so, probably the sky), and then the next puzzle would add a little more detail, and so on and so forth... And then the player can go back one screen to see all the layers combined.
That would be pretty fun actually!
I'd never heard of this version of picross before. I found this really fun and really addicting. I played this for like an hour, loved it.
With that out of the way, I would give a pinky for some kind of "erase" functionality. Especially on the levels where it's asking you to redo the puzzle with your art still on there, it's tough trying to work out the solution with the old stuff right there. I would generally try to just paint it all one color as a kind of "reset" but I didn't love that.
I also had trouble differentiating colors sometimes. I don't think you're helped by your level 1 being yellow, grey, and different grey. That confused me at first and made me think I didn't know the rules when I was first giving it a try. In the later levels, trying to tell the difference between "sort of salmon" and "sort of red" is tough as well. And I actually have good color vision! I feel bad for color blind people, ha.
I wish I could click through Bob Ross' text boxes as well. And the "next level arrow" maybe should be signposted a touch more. Could it start "grow and shrinking" when it's ready for the next level? Does it already? I had some issues with that at first.
Amazing game, great job.
Thanks so much for the detailed feedback! Yeah, there's issues with UX with the colors of puzzles and back button animation, eughhh... When the judging period's over, I definitely plan to fix pretty much all those issues with juicier UI and nice transitions between scenes and fixing up the puzzles so they have more color contrast.
For clicking through the text, are you referring to how slow he speaks and that you want to click the text so he finishes his line immediately? Bob only has one line of text for every page, so clicking through the text wouldn't do anything otherwise lol
I wasn't sure if we should have added an eraser-like function since that wouldn't be very paint-like... but Picross games usually let you reset the board. Maybe a clear paint color in a bucket would be a good compromise?
Heck, you could have a "clear colored" paint on the palette a little sequestered from the rest on every palette (I don't know how clear this would be), or an eraser (I know you can't technically erase paint but this would be VERY clear). I think theme can suffer a little for playability :)
Ok, I only finished the first puzzle, mainly because I wanna play other entries, but this is pretty great! I like the whole picross with colors idea and the art looks pretty good! The puzzles are also really neat too and easy to understand. Overall, really good game that I will come back to later!
Full confession: I'm addicted to picross. It's like my soothing game I play when nothing else is going on. Now, with the addition of Bob Ross, it's even more soothing! Art style is great here, gameplay is great (haven't tried this type of picross before, actually).
My only point of feedback is that it might be good to have a little blurb up front to explain how this version of picross works. I found the tool tip luckily, but before that I was just winging it. Anyway, this is the full package, way to go!
I never liked these kinds of puzzles but with the amount of work and quality that was put into the presentation here I couldn't put this one down. Felt so completely peaceful and really felt good to accomplish something.
Very good. Well implemented. Im pretty bad at it but thats on me, not on the game.
This game is perfect in every way. I'm not kidding this is amazing.