Placing Picasso

Placing Picasso is a puzzle game aimed at all audiences, taking place in an art gallery, with each level focusing on a painting to be restored. The game primarily focuses on restoring of cubist styles pictures. Within this game, audiences will work with the protagonist to rebuild the paintings. This will be achieved by completing each layer of the puzzle and placing the shape in the correct order until the portrait is fully completed. While the audience is completing the level the protagonist will provide feedback in relation to where they have placed the piece. 

In this project, I took on the role of main programmer and game developer. To break down the process, let's look at the picking up and placing of pieces.

Each piece consists of 2 parts, a canvas with the image of the pieces and a game object underneath with its mesh renderer off. The gameobjects underneath were made using Unity's ProBuilder and are similar in shape to the image of the piece. The gameobject has a tag named "Drag" on it which allows the player to pick it up and place it again with the left mouse click. When the piece is in the correct location, the tag changes to "Complete", therefore the piece cannot be picked up again.

All of the pieces are stored in arrays, a different array for each layer of the painting (foreground, middle ground, and background). Each piece has a corresponding gameobject that is in that piece's target location or correct position. Each of these gameobjects are similarly stored in their own array system. This makes it easy to access the piece's correct position as both the piece and the correct gameobject will share the same index.

After implementing the main mechanics, next was adding quality-of-life changes for the player and ways to make the game more challenging.

The first thing added to make the game more challenging was randomising the rotations of the pieces when they went onto the palette. Then the player can rotate the piece they are holding using, using Q and E to rotate left or right by 90 degrees respectively.

When the piece is in the correct location and rotation, then it snaps into place and cannot be picked up again. To make this clear a star particle effect was added and a chime sound effect. Similarly, a sound effect was also added when the piece was placed in the wrong location.

Next was adding Mr. Moustache's helpful tips. This works by creating Physics CheckSpheres radiating from the correct location of the piece currently being held. It checks the mouse's position and, depending on how close the mouse is, Mr. Moustache gives different feedback. Furthermore, if the player has the piece at the right location but has the wrong rotation, he will say it needs to be rotated. Mr. Moustache also gives audio feedback in the way of 'Hmms' and 'Ahhs' which correspond with his speech bubble.