Canvas

Intro

"Canvas" is a difficult project to describe in my opinion. If I had to compare it to anything it would be those sites where you and other people can change one pixel at a time in order to modify a living piece of art. Albeit the only person with editing control here is the player whose free to do what they want within the limitations of the system. As for why Redd developed this project. It appears it was part of a contest which placed extreme limitations on the participants.

Redd
. . . I made this for a contest where you could only use ONE of everything. One character set, one tileset, etc. That's why it is so limited but I figured I would try doing something different than what I thought other people would be doing, which was making an actual game.

On one hand I suppose the limitations the developers were placed under forced them to be creative at least. Though, I'd argue that Redd didn't make a game. A game in my opinion tends to have some sort of end goal to it. That's really not the case with "Canvas" since you can edit and modify your work as much as you want. You can even send the files to others I suppose and allow them to make changes to it as well. Albeit doing so is probably more work than it's worth.

Bugs

This project contains a few odd bugs. For starters you can't actually clear the canvas by interacting with the other post.



Additionally the game will only allow you to change blank tiles when it feels like it. Another odd bug that pops up with some regularity when your interacting with options further back in the list is that you'll sometimes edit the tile your standing on or be immediately prompted after editing the tile to the right of the post to edit the tile your standing on. This seems to be especially likely to happen if your standing on a blank tile or placing a lot of them in rapid succession.

Controls

You control a simple post who can interact to the right of it's current position by pressing the enter key. You can then select one of thirteen options for what you'd like to replace the small rubble tile with. This can range from flowers to woodpiles. Albeit the options are presented to you in rather small groupings. So getting to some of the later options in the list can be rather annoying to say the least. And if you interacted with a tile by mistake you can press the x key in order to cancel out of the menu and leave the tile as is.

On the plus side the controls are rather easy to work with. On the other hand creating anything with this tool is extremely time consuming. It took me about twenty-three minutes to put together the little master piece below.


I call it "Campground Surrounded by Flowers".

Music

Oddly enough the title screen lacks music, but while your painting your canvas as it were there is calming music playing in the background. I suppose it's appropriate considering were creating a forest landscape.

Conclusion

"Canvas" is an interesting project in the sense that it's so different from anything else on this site that I can think of at the moment. In fact, the most comparable project I can think of is "BadApple.lmu" where your basically doing the work of Windows Media Player when it creates random visualizations as a song plays if it lacks visuals. As far as my recommendation on this project goes. I'll be honest, I'm really not sure what you can do with this project that you couldn't do easier or better with RPG Maker if you simply wanted to create a beautiful map for people to look at that is 20 by 15 tiles. In other words, I'm not sure this project really serves any sort of useful purpose as a tool and the extremely limited options your given to work with means it feels to limiting to really create anything worthwhile. Add in the fact there is very limited fun to have here and I say this project is only worth a quick look if your curious to see what Redd could come up with while under the sort of limitations he was.