This mind-bending mixed-reality indie game breaks into the real world

Forget Pokémon GO, a new indie game is coming to break the wall between video game world and the real world in a whole new way. Picto is a mobile game about a pixel art character called Tim who's trapped inside a game but starts having dreams about a universe beyond.

Built in a custom engine rather than one of the best game development platforms, the game uses a new mixed-reality technique that merges 2D pixel art with the real world as captured by the player's cameraphone. Mechanics include making Tim walk on real-world objects with certain colours, be it a game controller or even a cat.

Some puzzles involve having to find real-world objects with certain colours so that the character can walk through them in order to escape from situations in the game world. This leads to some interesting puzzles and level design.

In other levels, the player has to use real-world objects to help the character navigate classic platform-like problems in the game world. In some cases, the colours of pixels do different things, for example blue pixels turn into water that flows out into the game through a particle based fluid simulation. In one example, which currently still has placeholder art, the sky turns into water, allowing the player to get out of a hole.

Programmer Gustav Almström is also working on an in real life level editor, which allows levels to be created by placing enemies, players and goals and taking pictures or videos. A level can contain multiple pictures or videos, which can be switched between with buttons that the player has to touch.

With art from Olof Nilsson and music and sound from Dennis Qvarfordt, Picto's an example of the advantages of building your own game engine from scratch rather than using one of the popular pre-built engines like Unity or Unreal Engine 5, Gustav says. He built a custom engine written in C++, allowing Picto uses a combination of different custom-made systems that don't already exist in other engines.

“I stand pretty firmly on the side that using a pre-built engine limits your imagination somewhat,” he says. “You will be thinking about what you can do with rigidbodies, character controllers, scripts, effects and so on, instead of just thinking about pure code and all of the things that a computer actually is capable of doing.

You can find links to the Kickstarter and to demos of the game for Android and iOS at the Picto website.

For more game inspiration, see the novel Unreal Engine 5 sims Drain Sim and... er... Stone Simulator – now multiplayer!