My Child Painted a Camel at School. Then It Escaped Into a Game.

Could a piece of school artwork become a game someone could actually play? My child’s watercolour camel became a character, gained a world and surprised its original creator.

EXPERIMENTS

8/22/20263 min read

Play Camel's Oasis →

Could a piece of school artwork become a game someone could actually play?

That was the question behind my first experiment in inexpensive curiosity.

It started with a watercolour painting my child brought home from school.

The character was a camel wearing sunglasses and a bright blue harness. It had a huge smile, bold black outlines and more personality than most professionally designed mascots.

Like many pieces of school artwork, it could have gone on display for a while, been carefully stored and then rediscovered years later.

Instead, I wondered what would happen if the camel could leave the painting.

I did not want to replace it with a polished, generic cartoon. I wanted the recognizable character from the actual watercolour to become something my child could interact with.

First, protect what is personal

Before doing anything else, I removed my child's name from the image.

The artwork could become public. His identity did not need to.

I kept the details that made the painting his: the watercolour texture, imperfect outlines, unusual head, sunglasses, smile and bright blue harness.

Those were not mistakes to clean up. They were the character.

The camel needed a body

The original painting was a portrait, so it ended before we could see the rest of the camel.

That was fine on paper. It became a problem when the camel needed to run and jump.

The challenge was to imagine the missing body without turning this particular camel into a generic one. The face and upper body stayed recognizable. Then it gained a body, a hump, a tail, four legs and four feet in the same handmade watercolour style.

Now the camel could move. It needed somewhere to go.

Building Camel's Oasis

The warm colours and leaves in the painting suggested a desert adventure.

That became Camel's Oasis, a small browser game where the camel jumps over rocks, collects water drops and travels toward an oasis.

You tap, click or press one key to jump. There is no account, no download and no long explanation.

The first twenty minutes took the idea from “What if?” to something we could see and test.

Then we discovered a fairly important problem.

The first full-body camel was much too large for its own game. It could barely jump over the rocks.

We made it smaller, increased the jump and made the collisions more forgiving. Each change came from playing it and seeing what was wrong.

This one kept earning another twenty minutes.

Then I showed it to him

The best test was not technical.

I showed the game to my child. He recognized his camel immediately and watched it run through the desert, jump over rocks and collect water.

He looked genuinely surprised.

Then he said, “That is super cool.”

That was the result I cared about.

This is not the world's greatest camel game. It was never supposed to be.

I wanted to know whether a school watercolour could become something my child could actually play.

It could.

The first camel was too large to clear its own rocks. We changed it and tried again. Then its original artist saw something he had painted at school escape the page and begin an adventure.

That was enough for Experiment 1.

Play Camel's Oasis →

Experiment 1 of 100

Three stages showing the school watercolour becoming a complete camel character

The watercolour camel jumping over a rock toward a blue water drop and desert oasis

Lisa Lieu

Founder and Systems Builder | Operations, Technology, AI, and Leadership