Well, now that that's over…

Let's dissect the remains shall we? I'll avoid going into depth about the narrative side of things and focus more on the technical and gameplay side of things.

The original concept was you would drain color, mix color, drink it ect., and it would drain slowly like an oil lamp. The behavior of objects as they drained would be determined by the color draining. The behaviors of each additive primary (RGB) would be determined by the player at first by a color for three phrases representing the behaviors ("Flares brightly at first then quickly sputters down", "Simmers quietly for a time before rising triumphant", ect) since different colors would mean different things to different people. It's a cheap way to get the player to take ownership of the world.

There would be islands of color the player had to find a way to without draining out, and then after finding a path, find a way to drag their traveling partner with them, as they are your source of more vials. Each island is supported by a Vein, that regenerates one color until all color objects around it are drained, at which point it drys out. There would be abstract characters in the color islands that were either oblivious of the world ending or in a state of paralyzing depression because of it. It was intended that the player would think about how draining the world to progress was shoving it faster towards doom.

The grey areas outside these islands would be invisible until approached, and contain simple top down puzzle game elements from the Legend of Zelda series, ect. The catch being nothing moves or operates without color, and everything starts draining soon as you fill it, while you yourself are draining. Mixing colors to get desired rates of drain or speed or whatever I could hook up to the color curves was the intent.

That said, you can probably imagine only a fraction made it in. You start inside one of only 2 islands, the second just there for the sake of giving you something to find. Mostly we have a grey maze that kills you as you walk through it, a switch that doesn't activate unless you color it in first (if you can tell it's a switch, hats off), and a giant beastie thing in your way. Attempt to fill the beast is what you're supposed to do, it was intended to be a puzzle in that you need to bring monsters alive occasionally because they block the way, then bait them out of your path, and flee until they drain back to grey. Your color choice would determine how fast and long they lasted.

I got color vials, draining, filling , drinking, and vomiting in, but half way through the month, I realized it wasn't exactly engaging , and I was at a loss at how to make it so. I set up a static variable toolbox with 3 animation curves. If you watch different colored Color Objects fade away, you'll notice the Safe Zone Bloom shrinks and expands at a different rate depending on their coloration. And that's about it, I never hooked those curves up to anything else. I had an idea where certain conditions could cause reactions and such, but I never extruded it out of my head.

I shoved art duties onto Farenhiet, which freed me to do the scripting parts, but then I tried to give them the scripts so they could start designing levels. Unfortunately what I put together wasn't incredibly intuitive, so it would probably have been a better idea to just do the gameplay design myself and have them work on environments. The level you see in the entry is a combination of what they tossed me in a blend file and what I made for that earlier demo video.

But despite being a shivering mass of broken bones I intend to continue it at some point, and Farenhiet says he'll update it with a thing.

Time to collapse. Or livestream game dev. Or just Daylight. Yeah let's do that.

(Driven by Lazyness)

PS:NO MORE GAME JAMS FOR ME. OR COMPS. At least not until I finish the 5 babies I already made. They cry to me in the night "Daddy why don't you love us?" "Sorry busy making you another FrankenSibling".