Picture Paintball
Main Programmer
Sep 2020 - Dec 2020
Picture Paintball is a game made for iPhone and Android created in the Unity engine. This is being developed by Team Paintball, a five person team.
On this project, I am taking the role of main programmer and have programmed almost all of the gameplay features. The goal of this project is to create a fun and casual game while gaining experience developing on mobile platforms.
The levels in the game feature a blank canvas that must be colored in to match the picture in the background. The player flicks spawned paintballs which color in the parts of the canvas that they hit. The canvas itself is actually composed of multiple layers of sprites that make up the full image. These sprite layers have collision boxes that when hit by the paintballs, access the color value of it and apply that color to themselves. Creating this feature in the Unity engine was especially tricky, as there is no function to directly change the color of a sprite, only to apply a color layer on top of the base sprite. This means that all sprites have to be pure white. Going through other possible implementations and arriving at this one took 12 hours overall.
In this script, the paintball detects when the player has touched the screen and records that position as well as where the player stops touching the screen. These two values create a vector that applies a force to the paintball. This is how the "flicking" action is created. Because of this project, developing for mobile platforms is now much easier for me to do.
This script is what spawns the paintballs into the level. It takes in an array of vectors that represent all possible colors that the paintballs should be. This array changes based on the level, as each level features a different background image with different colors. The paintball object is instantiated, given a color and an initial force. I worked on this feature for 3 hours due to some interesting complications converting between integers that represent the RGB values of the colors to byte values and floats.
Using the ProBuilder Unity tool, I created custom meshes for each piece of the paintings that the team's artist provided me. These custom meshes were attached to the individual pieces as mesh colliders so that the paintballs can color in individual parts of the pictures.
This code is what changes the color of each sprite to match the paintballs that hit them. I had to initialize each sprite by first changing its shader to one that is pure white. Then, I can modify the color of the sprite to any RBG value I want, which I can get from the paintballs. The trickiest part of this was figuring out how to use a custom shader as well as figuring out that I how to convert the float values of the paintball into RGB values.