Puzzle Platforming with Paint: Dreampainters

At the Games from Poland booth at PAX West 2026, ConFreaks & Geeks spoke with Jakub Bujas, lead developer of Dreampainters and CEO of Stability Games. Dreampainters is an upcoming first-person puzzle game inspired by puzzle games of yesteryear. The game’s surreal imagery and use of paint as a puzzle-solving mechanic instantly stood out on the show floor.

Can you give us the game’s elevator pitch? 

Imagine Portal and Splatoon having a baby. That’s Dreampainters. It’s a labor of love from Portal lovers to Portal lovers. 

It definitely seems puzzle-oriented. So you’re trying to reach certain goals? 

Yeah, exactly. In this game, you are a painter who travels through dreams and solves puzzles using different paint colors. Each color has a different ability. So, for instance, blue paint conducts electricity or black paint reveals hidden objects. There’s bouncy paint and accelerating paint and so on. 

That’s really cool. I’m just excited to see more types of paint. How do you unlock new colors? Does it happen naturally as you progress through the game? 

Yeah, exactly. You have to collect them using big giant paint tubes. But during some sections, you might not have access to certain paint. Sometimes we’ll give you a sub-group of colors to make the puzzles more interesting. 

Well, sometimes I can’t find my paint tubes. I’m drawn to the aesthetic because I paint using watercolors for fun. So are there any other sources of inspiration aside from the games in question? 

Of course. So I started the first prototype because I really was keen on The Unfinished Swan. It’s cool and it’s a small indie game. And I love the mechanics, so I tried to recreate them. I made two attempts: the first one during my studies, and the second one after I left Frozen District after working on House Flipper 2. And when I left Frozen District, I started to recreate the mechanics again but with different tools, different ideas, and a different approach with more experience behind my back, yeah? And it happened that my wife is a really big fan of Portal. So when we finished Portal 2 in co-op, we realized that there’s a lack of those games nowadays, especially couch co-op.

So I decided to combine the great features from The Unfinished Swan and puzzle platformers as well as the motif from Portal that you are a part of the experiment and solve puzzles. So I didn’t mention it, but in Dreampainters you can play in 2-player co-op. There’s couch co-op and you can play it over the network. So it’s worth mentioning because some don’t realize that when they see Dreampainters during the event, yeah? 

So it supports split-screen, then? 

Yeah, exactly. 

Yeah, again, as you say, couch co-op doesn’t really exist as often nowadays so thank you so much for doing that. 

That’s a thing. Yeah. 

So when you play 2-player, are the stages different or are they the same? 

It depends. In the single-player campaign, you can play together but it’s not focused on cooperation because it’s meant for a single player. But we also have dedicated co-op missions. There’s more put into communication and cooperation. We sometimes split players and force them to give each other any tips, signs, and so on. We’ve got some stages that require cooperation. 

Got it. I’m so fascinated about the possibilities, just thinking about all the different colors and the like. It also seems like the stages are kind of large. Is that a common thing? What can we expect from the size of these stages? 

Definitely bigger than Portal. We checked how it works if we made levels that are closed or open. We discovered that open spaces are better in terms of our dream-like setup. So this feeling with a lot of skies and clouds make this setup atmospheric, yeah? 

It really does seem atmospheric, yeah. 

So our levels are quite spacious and each level contains like many small ones with small puzzles. And all in all, it’s getting bigger and bigger, but at some point it’s yeah, they are not too big. We don’t want to overwhelm the player. 

The open skies seem different from Portal’s levels. Those are relatively indoors, right? So it’s interesting that you mentioned that. That’s so cool. So do you have an estimated length for how long the campaign might be? 

Yeah, sure. For a typical player who is not acing every level, the single-player campaign should be about five up to six hours. We’ve also got co-op dedicated missions and right now we’ve got thirteen of those. So about three to four hours to complete those. 

I feel like I might get stumped so it might take longer than that for me personally. I’m so entranced. Also, in terms of the variety of biomes, is this [surreal building] generally what we can expect from the visual motif or do we have other dream-like worlds? Not to spoil things too much.

We got the main motif which we like to call REM Zero. It’s a painting motif that’s rather rustic and vintage because it’s collected with the painter’s workshop. But when you progress in a dream, it gets more and more into the theme of the dream. We’ve got three different themes. One is the office theme because our protagonist Ray is struggling a lot working in a corporation. His boss Gar is bullying him because you know, he’s artsy. He doesn’t belong in a corporate space. There are dreams about traveling, about journeying to Egypt and Greece. And also some sci-fi stuff. So, yeah, everything for everyone, yeah? 

It definitely feels like it lives to the game’s name for sure, just in terms of all of these dreamlike spaces. I just love seeing the environment design as I’ve dabbled in environment art before. So it’s just really cool seeing all of the different prop designs.

This dreamy set-up gives us a lot of freedom to pick any motif and it should work. So that’s pretty cool that we can just unleash our creativity and it works. 

Yeah, that’s awesome. Oh, here’s the brush right here. I think those are all the questions they have for now. I really appreciate your time. 

Thank you very much, man.

Many thanks to Jakub of Stability Games for taking the time to interview with us.