Paintball

Paintball is a homebrew game for the N64 by Anacierdem and released on 13 Dec 2024. In it you play as one of four pill-shaped characters trying to shoot each other from a top-down until everyone is the same colour.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Paintball

In Paintball, each player plays as a pill-shaped creature that can shoot paintballs (of course) in four directions. The objective is of course to cover all your opponents in your colour before they do it to you.

When a player gets covered in paint after a few hits, they convert to the team of the player that soaked them. From this point forward they play as though they are on the same team, both shooting the same pellets at the remaining opponents.

If your team wins, you get a point. If you score a kill for the winning team, you also get a point. If you’re the last one standing, you have the chance to win by running away for 15 seconds, granting you two points.

If you shoot too many bullets in quick succession, it will make your character overheat, causing you to become a sitting duck for a few seconds.

As time goes on, the play area gets smaller, forcing all the players to engage with each other. As players shoot around the map, it started to get covered in paint, but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t affect the gameplay at all.

The game consists of five rounds. At the end of the game, player’s points across the rounds are added up to determine who is the winner.

Credits

Paintball was made by Anacierdem, a long-time contributor to 64brew game jams.

Review and conclusion

When developing my game for the game jam, I tried to keep everything spoiler-free as much as possible, but the only game I got a whiff of was Paintball since I saw it either on the Discord channel or in the source repo somewhere.

When I finally got to play it, I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting it to look either like a first-person shooter or at least something like Splatoon. The cel-shaded graphics and paintable floors really do give Paintball its own personality.

There is some strategy involved, but it does feel counterintuitive. I feel as though it is kind of counterintuitive that you have to play for the team that just shot you, but you can end up in a kind of situation where your opponents are your original team and you have to choose whether to ‘sacrifice’ yourself back to your original team or play for the one you’re on. This happens more often than you’d expect if two players are shooting each other at the same time.

Overall, Paintball is a fun game that takes a little while to get used to, but is definitely a blast with four players.