Paintra

About The Game

Paintra is a 2D platformer action game that blends classic mechanics with modern twists. Embark on a colorful adventure through watercolor worlds.

Inspiration & Origins

Paintra was heavily inspired by the NES classic Mr. Gimmick! (known as Gimmick! in Japan). I loved the physics-based star mechanic and wanted to create something with that same sense of fluid movement and challenge. Development began in 2019, and a polished demo was eventually completed.

The Future of Paintra

While the fate of the original project is currently up in the air, the concepts and world remain dear to me. With improving technologies, I am considering fully recreating and redeveloping the game in Unity in the future. Things aren't looking confirmed at the moment, but you never know—dates and plans change, and the next version of Paintra might look very different.

Media & Trailers

My Development Journey

The development of Paintra started with high-resolution vector assets. However, this caused significant rendering issues in GDevelop as the images were too large.

To resolve this, I switched to using tilemaps and scaled down the resolution to achieve a NES-style aesthetic. This required redesigning and recreating all textures for a pixel-art look.

Custom tilesets were made with LDtk. While LDtk is a powerful tool, the workflow was slightly cumbersome due to the lack of native integration. GDevelop didn't have a built-in tilemap editor at the time, necessitating this third-party importation process.

GDevelop has evolved significantly since Paintra's development, now boasting 3D support and advanced features. However, back then, the drag-and-drop system and third-party reliance made creating large-scale professional levels a challenge. While it's a fantastic tool for getting started, I found its limitations appearing as the project scale increased.

Original Soundtrack