Just one more picture ... just one more ...

September 16, 2014 7:01 AM

PixelThis is the first incremental game (previously, more) to use the movement of the mouse as its gameplay input rather than clicking. But if you don't want to play it as a game, you can make one simple tweak to it and transform it into an oddly relaxing web toy.

The game itself moves pretty slowly, but you can ignore the game aspect entirely, increase the size of your cursor, and suddenly you have a soothing toy in which you "paint the pixels away" to reveal one picture after another. Simply open up your browser's Javascript console, and enter this:

Pixel.State.cursorSizeLvl = 150

Change the number to whatever you want - the bigger the number, the bigger your paintbrush.

posted by jbickers (39 comments total)

Yes but at what point are there kittens involved.
posted by phunniemee at 7:19 AM on September 16, 2014 [8 favorites]

Thanks a lot OP - - it's almost insidious!

(Reminds me somehow of Desert Bus...)
posted by fairmettle at 7:21 AM on September 16, 2014

Interesting to see how much you need to clear to figure out what is in the image.

It seems to be scraping imgur for material, but I'm not sure if it has any sort of filter on it. The first image I got was a kitten. The second one was bordering the line of good taste.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:28 AM on September 16, 2014

There doesn't seem to be any filter aside from not using images specifically tagged as NSFW. If the borderline pic doesn't have the tag, it'll get selected.
posted by HoteDoge at 7:34 AM on September 16, 2014

It reminds me of making starscapes in UltraPaint back in the day.
posted by ian1977 at 7:55 AM on September 16, 2014

Reminds my of a bit of Candy Box, which I just beat for the first time last week by leaving it in an open tab while at work.
posted by dagosto at 7:59 AM on September 16, 2014

Whoa, the pixel party bonus-round thingy may be borderline dangerous for folks with epilepsy. Just an FYI.
posted by Ufez Jones at 8:01 AM on September 16, 2014

The fastest way to progress (without cheat codes) seems to be spending all your points on the bigger cursor and manual splitter and resetting the picture often, without finishing. I just spent waaaaay too much time on this.
posted by Huck500 at 8:07 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yes but at what point are there kittens involved.

One of my gifs was a little black kitten attacking a big white dog right in the face, so...
posted by Huck500 at 8:12 AM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

...rather than clicking

Mind of Cortex ... BLOWN
posted by Wordshore at 8:13 AM on September 16, 2014

I just finished filling in this image. Mmm.
posted by theodolite at 8:18 AM on September 16, 2014

I just got Patrick Stewart. How. Lucky. Am. I?
posted by Thing at 8:21 AM on September 16, 2014

How. Lucky. Am. I?

I spent some time methodically erasing Joseph Gordon Levitt's pants.
posted by phunniemee at 8:23 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

apparently this works with animated gifs
posted by subtle_squid at 8:27 AM on September 16, 2014

Yes but at what point are there kittens involved.

Jackpot! First try.
posted by whitecedar at 8:30 AM on September 16, 2014

I've gotten the same coke bottle image twice.
posted by plinth at 8:44 AM on September 16, 2014

It says absolutely nothing about incremental gaming that my first image was Jack Torrance's "All work and no play..." manuscript from The Shining.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:59 AM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

I've gotten a Monopoly board three times. It's a huge image, and very boring to uncover, so I would probably be enraged if I were playing this for real.
posted by isthmus at 9:00 AM on September 16, 2014

I've gotten the same coke bottle image twice.

Scratch one more coke bottle and you win a free ticket!
posted by fairmettle at 9:08 AM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes but at what point are there kittens involved.

Immediately. On my very first image, the first thing I recognized after many minutes of clearing was the face of a kitten.
posted by intermod at 9:10 AM on September 16, 2014

I would probably be enraged if I were playing this for real.

Yes, obviously all these games are best played ironically.
posted by Naberius at 9:19 AM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm cheating like hell and the pictures I'm getting are still not worth the effort.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:25 AM on September 16, 2014

I'm sorry, that sounds like I'm just straight-up complaining that this free game isn't good enough. But I'm trying to point out one obvious path for improvement.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:26 AM on September 16, 2014

Western Infidels: "I'm cheating like hell and the pictures I'm getting are still not worth the effort."

There's your first world problem right there!
posted by chavenet at 10:14 AM on September 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

Man, years of hyperactive, fidgety mouse use have made it really difficult for me to make the long, steady mouse strokes that seem like they ought to be the most efficient way to clear stuff. Also the bombs seem kind of stupid, but maybe I just haven't upgraded them enough.
posted by Copronymus at 10:19 AM on September 16, 2014

Don't feel too bad, the performance appears to get much worse the more upgrades you have, and there is no hand slow enough to avoid gaps and such at that point.
posted by rhizome at 10:30 AM on September 16, 2014

I'm on an old macbook with tons of upgrades, and the performance seems fine. The bombs are pretty useless.
posted by Huck500 at 10:33 AM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the picture selection could definitely use some tweaking. I just got a picture of a teenage girl entitled "RIP Kaitlyn" and there was no way in hell I was finishing that one.
posted by Copronymus at 10:39 AM on September 16, 2014

You can also hack it to get infinite money:

Pixel.State.numPixels = 999999999999999

Or forget money and manually set your upgrade levels:

Pixel.State.cursorSizeLvl = 1;
Pixel.State.autoCursorSpeedLvl = 0;
Pixel.State.cursorBombSizeLvl = 0;
Pixel.State.cursorBombSpeedLvl = 0;
Pixel.State.cursorBombChainLvl = 0;
Pixel.State.cursorBombMaxChainLvl = 1;

It seems there's no end to upgrades. At the higher levels, your upgrades cost billions, then trillions, then quintillions of pixels. Even at bomb levels exceeding 8000, they're pretty useless.
posted by brenton at 10:57 AM on September 16, 2014

At the beginning, it reminds me of trying to scrape dried egg off of a pan with your thumb nail. You know you'll eventually get there, but it would be nice to have a power-up.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:15 AM on September 16, 2014

Marginally NSFW under the covers. Pic 2: "Is this [some stars] Penis?" Pic 3: "Had sex" meme with baby picture.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:01 PM on September 16, 2014

Well, I guess I did that all day.
posted by penduluum at 1:20 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

This definitely needs more point multipliers. x4 is not enough with these prices.
posted by kafziel at 1:22 PM on September 16, 2014

Is there any reason why the pixel count seemingly never matches up with the actual number of pixels in each photo? Actually clearing every pixel consistently puts my Image Complete percentage over 100%, and it doesn't seem like it should be that hard to actually count them beforehand.
posted by Copronymus at 1:40 PM on September 16, 2014

Carpal Tunnel: the Game?
posted by Gable Oak at 5:10 PM on September 16, 2014

Clever way to get people to make a dataset for your computer vision algorithm for image saliency.
posted by pwnguin at 5:49 PM on September 16, 2014

Once you get a kitten, you've won. Right?
posted by tykky at 6:51 AM on September 17, 2014

I'm so glad the new version gives the option to disable the Pixel Party flashing colors.
posted by CancerMan at 9:34 AM on September 17, 2014

I'm enjoying the core concept, but look forward to seeing what the creator does to build out the set of tools. Actually manually clearing images is a chore even after investing a lot in upgrades; bombs are as noted pretty useless, which is a problem given that they're an active rather than a passive event, because it doesn't provide enough reward for even the bother of clicking, let alone for being around and attentive to click; the automatic pixel stuff is very slow though in the spirit of incremental games will at least get a bit of work done overnight.

All of that could be tweakable, but beyond that more actual screensavery zazzle might be the thing that makes this more fun of a toy to look at. Have the automatic cursor actually be a ghostly cursor moving around; have bombs do more complicated particle effects (fireworks exploding traces out across the image! gradient bombs that uncover less and less dense shares of pixels as they radiate from the epicenter!); tie in synergies between the various skillsets so boosting auto cursors and manual cursors and bombs have crossover bonuses. And so on.

I am interested to see where the creator's going with this. It's easy for me to be like "oh they should and x, y, and z!" without knowing whether they (likely!) already have a pile of ideas on the todo list.

All that said, the core mechanic really is a horrible wrist-killer as implemented; if the game does not rebalance things to disincentivize protracted rapid manual mouse-shaking, it's gonna hurt a lose a lot of players and hurt a lot of wrists pretty quickly, and probably not in that order. Maybe have a bonus bar for manual pixel collection that charges slow but empties fast, so if you wait five minutes then pixel collection will have a big bonus multiplier but that drops rapidly back to zero over fifteen seconds of use? Maybe just throw a ton more weight behind the automatic stuff? I dunno. I'm already cleanly into "let's see what happens when I just let it idle" mode, because I can't bother with a tendonitis flareup just to scrape at random imgur selections.
posted by cortex at 10:50 AM on September 17, 2014