Forget fancy art programs — Worm Paint is my new canvas of choice

polygon.com:

Artists work in many mediums — acrylic or oil paints, pencil on canvas, inks and markers, or through a variety of digital methods. But true visionaries are all flocking to a paint program with unprecedented features and tons of fun tools. It’s calledWorm Paint, and it’s available on itch.io or, if you prefer to play in-browser, Newgrounds.

“When I first startedWorm Painta few weeks ago or so, it didn’t have a name yet and was just called ‘paintgame’ temporarily,” Worm Paint developer Tristone told Polygon via direct messages. “I then added a worm feature cause I thought it would be really funny to have worms crawl around on your artwork, after that my little twitter post with the worms being shown off blew up, I decided to theme the game around the worms since that’s the feature that really got the game decently popular in the first place.”

you really gotta *think* hard while drawing now! https://t.co/RVn2qF5HnV pic.twitter.com/tafibaP3Dr

Worm Paint immediately reminded me of KidPix, a similarly zany art program I enjoyed as a kid. Tristone was inspired by different sources: “I was more so inspired by games like Mario Paint and WarioWare DIY since those games have a lot of fun options that you can be really creative with,” Tristone said. “But I was also inspired by some more obscure free games like the old ‘Stress Reducer Desktop Destroyer’ from years ago, and LeatherIceCream’s game ‘Hedgehog Dilemma For Robots’ which has a really neat stamp and drawing feature on the game over screen.”

So whereas some art programs focus on having a great color picker or perspective tools, Worm Paint offers an entirely different arsenal. There’s a portal gun, if you want to teleport pieces of your art, or a hammer if you prefer to smash the canvas up. There are the titular worms, of course, and you can watch them inch their way across your screen, hook ‘em on a fishing pole, or simply stomp them and watch little worm ghosts go to heaven.

The game has so many of these unusual little