Artists work in many media — acrylic or oil paint, pencil on canvas, ink and markers, or various digital methods. But true visionaries all flock to a paint program with unprecedented features and a bunch of fun tools. It’s called Worm paintAnd his available on itch.io or, if you prefer to play in the browser, New grounds.
“When I first started Worm paint a few weeks ago it didn’t have a name yet and was temporarily called ‘paintgame’,” Worm paint “I added a worm feature back then because I thought it would be really funny to have worms crawling across your artwork. After my little Twitter post with the worms on it blew up, I decided to theme the game around the worms, since that was the feature that made the game pretty popular in the first place.”
Worm paint immediately made me think of KinderPixa similarly crazy art program that I enjoyed as a kid. Tristone was inspired by a variety of sources: “I was mostly inspired by games like Mario Paint and WarioWare DIY, because those games have a lot of fun options that allow you to be really creative,” Tristone said. “But I was also inspired by some more obscure free games like the old ‘S‘Tress Reducer Desktop Destroyer’ from years ago, and LeatherIceCream’s game ‘Hedgehog Dilemma For Robots’ which has a really cool stamp and draw function on the game over screen.”
While some art programs focus on a great color picker or perspective tools, Worm paint offers a whole different arsenal. There’s a portal gun, if you want to teleport pieces of your artwork, or a hammer if you’d rather smash the canvas. There are, of course, the titular worms, and you can watch them crawl across your screen, hook them onto a fishing rod, or just stomp them and watch the little worm spirits ascend to the heavens.
The game has so many of these unusual little tools that some streamers are creating their own rudimentary games within it Worm paintThe game is also designed to be moddable, allowing players to add their own tools if they wish. Is Worm paint functionally a great art program? Well, no, it’s not meant to create masterpieces — it’s meant to create your own fun. In that sense, explosions and slot machines are all part of the experience.
We live in an age where there are countless strange, ambitious, and interesting indie gems buried in the usual release schedule. I’m glad that in such a busy year for big game releases, people are discovering Worm paintThere’s something immensely liberating about making art on a destructible, temporary canvas before blowing it up or covering it in writhing worms.
Art and the process of making it are fun. Worm paint understands this, and that’s why I’ll keep it on my PC, alongside my advanced art programs.