After developing the gameplay mechanics, I needed to determine what the restoration mechanic would look like. Rather than making final game assets right away, I decided to run a couple of experiments to understand better how damage, restoration, and reveal work visually.
First of all, I created my own physical painting. While experimenting with colouring, texture, and visual styles, I also produced original artwork for future experiments. Producing the painting physically gave me something to play with and experiment with rather than just imagining how it could look when done digitally.
Then, after completing the painting, I experimented with partially covering the artwork with a removable layer. The idea here wasn’t to do professional painting restoration. My purpose was to test the basic interaction and visual satisfaction of progressively revealing the artwork beneath the surface.
The ability to immediately see the difference between the damaged and the restored painting gives the player an immediate visual reward. Another thing I liked about this experiment was that I could use my own artworks to add more variety to the game’s painting collection.
Now that I’ve done some visual experiments, I would like to develop a simple physical prototype to try the basic restoration interaction. I hope that the process of restoring and revealing an artwork through interaction might feel satisfying and comprehensible to another person.
The prototype has been made from one of my bead paintings, with a partial covering of certain areas of the artwork to represent damaged parts. The player begins the game with a partially hidden finished painting and gradually interacts with the artwork’s damaged areas. I made it as simple as possible to test only the mechanics of restoration and reveal for now.
How Does it Work? The interaction goes in the following sequence: Examine → Restore → Reveal → Complete
The player first examines the damaged painting, then interacts with the damaged areas. Gradually, these damaged areas are restored, and more of the painting itself is revealed.
What I want to test: With this simple physical prototype, I want to see whether the interaction is clear, whether revealing the painting is satisfying, and whether the player wants to complete the whole painting.
Also, I want to figure out whether the mechanic is too simple now and what improvements or additional ideas could be added without losing the game’s relaxing experience. These tests will tell me what to keep, change and develop further in my next version.
Playtesting with my friend^
This segment contains an audio review^
Review of the playtesting^