Turning a painting into play

Turning a painting into play is a tight box. In 2017 I built Abendgebet, a two hour Processing side scroller (yes, really) that turns Milan Kunc’s “evening prayer” into motion.

What worked, what broke, and what a tiny honest game can teach. 🎮👇

Architecture in miniature:
- One .pde sketch with a global state machine: START, PLAY, DEAD. draw() as the loop. input via keyPressed().
- Immediate mode rendering with image() and rect(). One background asset.
- Entities as PVectors for pos and vel. Arrays for obstacles. AABB checks.
- Camera is a worldOffset. Fake parallax by moving layers at different speeds.

Shortcuts from a two hour build:
- No delta time, so difficulty tied to FPS. Slow laptops felt easy. Fast ones felt unfair.
- Magic numbers for spawn gaps, gravity, and speed ramp. I tuned by vibe.
- Palette quantized to keep the mood readable with primitive shapes. Fewer mechanics meant clearer verbs.

Today I’d do it differently:
- Stack: or Godot for zero install. Fixed timestep with an accumulator.
- Design: small ECS or a scene graph, JSON tuning, collision layers, input buffering, a camera that respects composition.
- Lessons: preserve relationships not pixels. Pick one verb and make timing legible. Timeboxes show your defaults.
- Reality: classmates ran the exports. Zero issues filed, which hides usability bugs.

Open questions I still ask:
- If you start from mood, what system gives you the most leverage today?
- How do you keep the composition intact while adding motion?
- Your go to stack for a one evening game?
Here’s the project: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/abendgebet