Please do touch the artwork

Award-winning game designer Thomas Waterzooi is one of this year’s Indie game festival winners with Please, Touch the Artwork. We spoke to Waterzooi to discover how art, culture and the human condition influences his work of creating calm, quirky and wholesome games.

Thomas Waterzooi: You break the golden rule of museums by touching more than 160 iconic paintings, exploring the secret worlds hidden within them. There are three unique game modes, each inspired by an abstract Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an aesthetic journey into the origins of modern art, set to a soothing jazzy soundtrack.

As my games aren’t about skills or high scores, and Please, Touch the Artwork is about relaxing, tinkering and being sucked into lighthearted and bittersweet stories, I hope to inspire people to look up artists, go to a museum or embark on their own creative paths.

I was reading Will Gompertz’s 'What are you looking at', discovering what drove artists to make their art. I knew I wanted to do the same, so I tried creating a Mondrian-painting generator. From there, I wondered what would happen if a player could interact with these paintings, the stories they could experience if they came to life.

As my game is abstract, like the art that it represents, my biggest challenge has been helping people to understand it. Initially, I had three different games with three completely different mechanics and stories. I decided that, instead of covering three artists to give the game broader appeal, I’d focus on a single painter instead.

My journey into solo game development began in 2017 when I went solo after working at a few major studios as a gameplay and AI developer.

I knew I didn’t want to make (or play) violent games, but I was inspired by the idea of developing for a new audience, one that is interested in art, society and human interest. We have to learn how to make games for this audience so games can eventually become the art form that they deserve to be.

Browse the other winners and finalists from the Indie games festival 2022 Europe.