How One Developer Painted an Entire Game by Hand in Seven Years

You’ve probably heard of a number of games that use hand-painted elements – usually backgrounds. But what about a game where everything – every object, every background, every platform – was hand-painted? That’s what developer Pat Naoum did in The Master’s Pupil (the trailer of which you can watch below), and it took him a whopping seven years of painting to finish it.

I’m speaking to Naoum on a call just a few weeks after the launch of The Master’s Pupil, but when I ask him what he considers his job title to be, he tells me he’s still a bit hesitant about introducing himself as a game developer. For the last 15 years, he’s been a graphic designer, but he’s been working on his game for most of that time. He explains that the idea for The Master’s Pupil was first inspired by the work of Armenian photographer Suren Manvelyan. Naoum saw Manvelyan’s detailed photographs of up-close eyeballs roughly a decade ago, but it took several more years for him to percolate the idea that would become The Master’s Pupil.

“I had this idea of a game set in that landscape at this giant valley, and you start on the edge of the white where the edge of the iris is, and you’re moving towards the pupil,” Naoum explains. “I thought that was kind of a cool thing to aim for and I was drawing these ideas of an iris…And I thought, well, if the game started on the edge of the eye, and it started with the person who owns the eye…And so you’re experiencing some things coming in from their eye because you’re seeing what they see in the background of the game.”

Attention to Detail

While working as a graphic designer, Naoum quietly continued to muse on his idea, and began working on The Master’s Pupil seven years ago. He considered multiple angles for who the eyeball could belong to, first imagining a fictional person he could tie to his own personal stories. He settled on Claude Monet after reading about eye conditions and learning about cataracts, which Monet suffered from. And Monet, in many ways, was a perfect fit. His life was interesting, including travel, war, marriage, family troubles, and of course his painting. And his work itself was a perfect fit for Naoum, whose college art degree had focused on painting work in a similar style of work sitting right on the edge of abstraction and realism.

Unfortunately, Naoum didn’t know how to code. He had taken a coding course in college as part of a minor in media arts, but almost failed it. For a while, he tried working with a collaborator, but the partnership was easily sidetracked and Naoum eventually realized he would need to build The Master’s Pupil himself. So he bought a book of C# to reteach himself coding…and found he took to it much more easily the second time around.

“[In school] I was doing animation and we were splicing old film reels together and making this interesting art,” he recalls. “And then I had to sit on a computer and write code. So, [coding] seemed really boring. But when I suddenly had a goal and I had a reason to be making it and learning this, I was suddenly much more interested…But it still took ages, and I’m still bad at it. I still have to Google things, and I have a terrible memory.”

With the concepts of coding down and his idea solidified, Naoum was ready to begin in earnest. When he first started out, he says, he bought big brushes and had a plan to do large canvases and big smears of paint. But that idea quickly proved too challenging for one key reason: he didn’t have enough apartment space.

“I did a few, and then I realized that if I’m going to do this game, I’m going to have so many canvases in my apartment,” he says. “I’m going to just have stacks and stacks of art everywhere because I’m going to be making thousands of artworks. How the hell am I going to do this because there’s no way. I don’t have that much room.”

So he pivoted, eventually moving to doing small painting with very splashy paint that let him use less canvas. After some trial and error with photographing them, Naoum finally figured out a system of scanning these paintings into the game in layer, working carefully to capture as much of their texture and microdetail as possible.

“I ended up buying a film negative scanner…It’s designed to literally get a film negative and scan it in a very, very high resolution. So I could get this really high detail, and even on some of the first levels, you can see dust particles that are on the actual scanner bed that I just didn’t wipe off.”

Naoum’s system worked for the majority of The Master’s Pupil. He kept his paintings in binders, eventually ending up with roughly three binders full of art covering twelve levels of puzzles. However, as he neared the end of development, his method ran into another problem: in trying to ensure high levels of paint detail, Naoum had inadvertently made his game files way, way too big.

“When I got to the end of the game and we were porting it to Nintendo, I had hired this company and they were running through stuff and just checking off all the big things that I had missed because I was a first time coder. And the game file itself was 50 gigs, and for a five-hour game, it’s way too big because I just scanned these things in…I had made it a little bit smaller, but each thing was double the size it needed to be so I ended up going through and very painfully just lowering the resolution of everything. It was knives in my heart.”

Layers of Abstraction

During the creation of The Master’s Pupil, Naoum has had a lot of time to think about the ways in which games and visual arts intersect, especially in the abstract sense. As we chat, he waxes a bit poetic about the ways in which games are inherently abstract – for instance, picking up an object is abstracted for the player into just hitting a button. And yet so many AAA games tend to strive for something close to realism, especially when it comes to graphics. By contrast, he opines, indie titles tend not to have the budgets for realism, and lean into the abstract even more.

“Rather than ‘We spent millions of dollars and five years making this game be the most realistic rendition of Chicago,’ they’re like, ‘Here’s a square jumping through a landscape of straight lines and squares, and I’m just going to have a voiceover that makes it interesting.’ So that’s Thomas is Alone. Here’s the idea of Limbo, but we’re a side scroller and we’re just black and white shadows in a landscape. Even A Short Hike. It’s pixelated in this isometric thing, and you’re just running around.”

We chat for a while about Bennett Foddy’s games, too, especially the ways in which his earlier work QWOP and his upcoming Baby Steps abstract themselves even more until the very idea of lifting up one’s leg and taking a step is deeply abstracted to the point of humor. The conversation eventually turns back to The Master’s Pupil, which deals with the abstract not just in mechanics and its lack of dialogue or text, but in a very unique way through its visuals. Naoum is using real art and real paint as a vehicle for creating abstract scenes. As a result, he’s had feedback from players who found the game surprisingly nostalgic – many of them hadn’t looked at real paint and brush strokes up close in the same way since they were children playing with finger paints.

All this combined – the audience reaction, his experiences with other indie games, and his own abstract art experience – has Naoum curious what other ways video game developers can come up with to invoke audience reactions through abstract elements like visuals, sound, or game mechanics.

“An unintentional part of having realistic assets in a game, even though it’s not a realistic looking game, you are hitting into something that people recognize in those kinds of things,” Naoum says. “Because abstraction is all about that. How do we get this thing that people understand and abstract it enough so they can understand it in this different setting? So if you have an abstracted visual language that happens constantly in games too – press the button to open the door – how can you make that in an indie game in different ways?”

All Eyes on You

Good news: Naoum might get a chance to explore that territory with future games. The Master’s Pupil launched late last month on PC and Nintendo Switch and has been an unexpected success for him, largely thanks to some accidental social media virality. Over the years of development, Naoum was doing all of his own marketing, mostly just making social media posts once a week or and building a small community of fans. But then, just over a month before the game came out, one of his posts went viral unexpectedly. Then another. And suddenly The Master’s Pupil had been seen by millions of eyeballs just in time for launch.

“That was just this mind-blowing thing, because I was expecting this game would come out to a handful of people,” Naoum says. “But then these posts hit and everything went massive…and it just became this machine. I came from this tiny little indie space where I was not sure what I was doing, and suddenly it’s much bigger than I could ever have hoped for really, because I do have dreams of making a games company and keep making games.”

“My biggest hope was I could just make the next one. And so with the sales now I can actually do that. I can just keep doing full-time game days and go straight into the next game.”