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

ign.com:

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.”

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