Painted Out

One DreamLayer edit chain: the generated painting → "remove the man in red" → "remove his hat and reflection". Edits drifted ~21% outside the edited area, so each removable thing became its own layer.

🎨 Painted Out — Confessions of a Royal Retoucher

The Duke is petty, and history is negotiable. When someone laughs at him, they never existed — and it's your job to make the palace paintings agree.

Scrub them out of every oil painting. Then hunt down what they left behind: a hat on a peg, a reflection in the mirror, a hound still gazing at an empty saddle. And whatever you do, freeze when the Countess turns around.

4 days · about 8 minutes · a twist ending

How to play

• Drag to scrub. The decree shows everything that must vanish.
• Freeze when the Countess turns. Caught = scandal. Three scandals and you never existed.
• Don't smudge the wrong person (beware of twins).
• Space peek at the original · M music · G how it was made

Made with DreamLayer

Every painting in the game is a DreamLayer edit chain: generate the scene → "keep this exact painting, remove the man in red" → "remove his hat and his reflection". Every new scene was made image-to-image from one master painting, so the Duke, Bertram and Lady Constance keep their faces from the banquet to the ballroom. The Countess's front and back views come from one reference, and her walk cycle is a DreamLayer sprite sheet (12 frames, using DreamLayer's own frame timings).

What held: character identity across scenes, the oil-painting style, the edit instructions.
What drifted: edits re-render the whole image — I measured about 21% of pixels changing outside the edited area, and two edits came back zoomed or reframed (one rejected, one replaced by an earlier step).
How the game copes: every removable thing is cut into its own transparent layer locally (segmentation + a diff against the clean plate) and stacked over the final clean painting. Scrubbing erases layers, so the reveal stays seamless despite the drift.

Happy accidents kept: Bertram's reflection stayed in the mirror (now a trace to find), the hound kept staring at the empty saddle, the twin lost his wig (scrub him by mistake and he's bald), and erasing the lady left the Duke waltzing alone.

About 35 of 100 DreamLayer API credits used. Press G in-game for the full edit chain behind every painting.

Credits

Solo project by Lekhraj Saini. Phaser 4 + TypeScript. Art: DreamLayer (API/MCP, driven from Claude Code). Code written with Claude Code. Local cut-outs: BiRefNet via rembg. Sound: ZzFX. Music: an original procedural harpsichord minuet.

Source code & layer pipeline: github.com/Raj01701/painted-out