GameJam Day 4

Day 4

Today we made a sketch. Ok, EarlGrey had done the real work and I threw ideas on him (and he used his ideas too ;) ) but he managed to make a conceptual drawing and with the following little explanation I hope that our game idea is understandable. 

This could be a level (a fairly easy one) of our puzzle game. There are three waterfalls (later levels may be different colored ones and/or more). You need to unlock the portal in the front right. There are white (unpainted) blocks in it and you drag it with your mouse cursor out, see the needed color and you have to colorize this block so it has the color that is shown.

You can manage this by holding the block in/under the colored waterfalls and you need to mix the colors to get the fitting color for this block. You get more of the particular color you dip your block in when holding it longer at/in the waterfall. There are 10 (?) color steps.

e.g. when you need to make the block orange you hold it for 5 steps in the red and for 5 steps in the yellow waterfall so you get orange. But with these 10 steps each, you have 1000 different possible colors. These blocks could have different forms like rectangles or perhaps triangles etc. It would be annoying when you need to colorize 4 blocks with the same color but we will figure out those gameplay mechanics later.

When you have the correct color you can put the block back into the portal. After coloring all blocks you will see a little (blocky) picture in the portal and it unlocks and lets you pass or sucks you in. What exactly happens will depend on our story we need to think of in the future. I hope you get the base gameplay idea out of this description.

While EaryGrey draws the sketch I tried to load an example waterfall PNG because I wanted to know if I could change the color of the waterfalls easily with pygames power so we only need one waterfall image to potential get unlimited possible ones.

But I had trouble loading the Photoshop exported PNG and remembered that there was an issue or limitation that pygame can't load the image when using PNGs and it doesn’t have some PNG-format fitting. I loaded the PNG into GIMP and exported it. Then it worked but had no graded transparency. So it was not the desired result.

But that problem I will try to figure out tomorrow.