The Last Minute Gallery is a short drawing game made for Ludum Dare, which follows the story of the directory of a new indie art gallery, shocked to discover their delivery of indie paintings has been indefinitely delayed. This is compounded by the fact
that a crowd of journalists are coming in short order to review the gallery. The directory decides to create a set of paintings themselves to disguise the lack of artwork.
For each painting, the player is given a prompt and ten seconds with which to draw the image on a canvas using five colours; this was to keep with the Ludum Dare theme of "every ten seconds". This cycle repeats until
all paintings are finished; at this point, the gallery is updated with the paintings the player has created, and the fate of the gallery is revealed.
Per the rules of the category, I created all the assets used in The Last Minute Gallery; this includes art, all 3D assets, sound effects, and music (the latter of which reviewed about as well as you can probably imagine).
This was the first game I made that featured live texture editing, enabling the player to draw rudimentary images on a canvas and then save the result so that it could be viewed in the gallery review section later.
I also wrote the story and dialogue for the game, which reviewed very well; the game came third in the humour category in the compo, and sixth in that category out of all 2,420 entries in the Ludum Dare in that period.
Were I to remake the game, I would probably tween the pencil to the player's mouse position rather than use the player's mouse position directly to decide where to draw pixels on the canvas, as the existing implementation makes drawing fast strokes look a bit spotty.
I would probably also reduce the number of paintings required - in retrospect I think the core loop outstays its welcome slightly. For the 48 hours available to develop it, though, I'm happy with how it turned out.
