Leonardo's Painting Machine
This… is Leonardo’s Painting Machine! It’s my entry for the Ludum Dare 36 compo, a game jam where you make a game in 48 hours, this time to the theme of ‘Ancient Technology’.
The Painting Machine is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s lesser known inventions. In fact, before this game was released, nobody had ever heard about it.
This ancient machine is programmed using up to three punch cards, and the aim of the game is to reproduce some of Da Vinci’s most famous abstract pointillist paintings. It starts out easy, but the difficulty ramps up quickly, and the later puzzles can easily take an hour or more to solve.
The basic instruction set features movement and painting commands. Each punch card paints in a different colour. For control flow, you have jumps, conditionals and two numeric registers that can be incremented and decremented. Is it Turing-complete? No idea!
The game is playable in the browser, so what are you waiting for? And if you also participated in Ludum Dare, leave your comments here.