PROBABLY ART - That’s the name of the project I’ve been working on for the past 6 months. It’s a video game that’s not supposed to be a game. More precisely, it’s a virtual art exhibition with gaming elements. I’ve intentionally minimized the gaming aspects as much as possible to focus more on the artworks. 

The game is already finished and playable here on itch.io. Since I didn't made a devlog during development, I'd like to use this "Making of" to give some insight into the creation of PROBABLY ART.

Trailer

Test, Test & Test

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I create digital art and have already made several attempts to make it interactively accessible.

Here, you get a glimpse of how it all began. You see both the artwork…

and my efforts to add interaction to it.

The game concept was quite simple. Move around and you’ll hear music. Interact with the environment to add more melodies to the music.

I’m not a programmer. What you just saw took me 1.5 months to create. I’m pretty slow, right? However, I didn’t have to write a single line of code for it. It was all done in Construct 3, which allows for a kind of visual scripting. It simplifies things a lot, but it can still be challenging in many ways, at least for me. 

What I learned from this small test sequence, I was able to apply effectively to PROBABLY ART.

Why this project?

Visual art has always fascinated me, but I’ve noticed it can feel distant compared to music and movies, which instantly evoke emotions. Engaging with a painting requires willingness and sometimes takes time. That made me somewhat sad, knowing that we live in a fast-paced time with short attention spans. I wanted to counteract the idea that my art is just a fleeting moment while scrolling through social media timelines. I wanted to find a way to present my art in a way that ideally makes people stop and feel something when they look at it.

Sometimes I think the reason why I create art is that I can evoke the inspiring feeling in someone else that my favorite artists evoke in me. Simply put, I want to create a space where there’s an opportunity to see my art the way I do.

You just witnessed my tangled thought process, but it’s because of these thoughts that PROBABLY ART came into being.

Sneak Peek

It’s challenging to show a lot of in-game footage without spoiling everything, given the game’s playtime of 20–40 minutes. In the image above, you see a slightly altered version of an in-game screenshot though. As you can see, what was once a top-down game has transformed into a 2D platformer. Something else I can share is that the little blue guy in the middle is the playable main character. Wow! Quite a lot of information at once! Haha.

# Check if the player likes the game  
if likes_game:      
print("If you like my creation, please like and comment on the PROBABLY ART game page. Thank you! :)")

Thanks for reading!