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A jam submission

ColorlessView game page

Paint your way through a Colorless World
Submitted by qtipbluedog — 1 day, 10 hours before the deadline
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Play game

Colorless's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Cleverness#934.0004.000
Playability#1004.0004.000
Theme#4263.0003.000
Artistic Style#4693.0003.000

Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

  • I had a fun time with this. For Platability, I found that it is quite a hard game, but I assume its just a skill issue on my part. I only encountered one bug, I died right as I dashed and when I respawned, I was flung out of the map and had to restart it to fix. The theme implementation is a bit weak. I can see what you mean by it spreading, however I think leaving a paint smear whenever you attack, dash, or move would make the theme more obvious! With a lack of any story, I still find having to quickly mix paints to attack your enemies quite fun and unique! I like the simplistic art style, and the music and sound effects are very high quality.

Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes

Tell us about your game!
You play as The Lone Painter trying to spread color back to the World.

A Controller is Recommended, (tested with Xbox).

All art, sounds, music and gameplay created by qtipbluedog. (Well... Except for the input icons. Thanks Kenney. You're the GOAT)

Controls:
Keyboard
Movement: WASD
Dash: LShift
Attack: Left Click
Primary Paint Switch: E
Secondary Paint Switch: Q
Mix Primary/Secondary Paint: Right Click
Clear mixed Paint: Middle Mouse


Gamepad (Xbox) - Not Tested with PS or Switch
Movement: Left Stick
Dash: Bottom Face Button (A)
Attack: Left Face Button (X)
Primary Paint Switch: Right Bumper
Secondary Paint Switch: Left Bumper
Mix Primary/Secondary Paint: Top Face Button (Y)
Clear Mixed Paint: Right Face Button (B)

Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Extra Notes
Thanks for Hosting this PirateSoftware and crew. And thanks for Judging! Excited to be in my first game jam like many others!

Leave a comment

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Comments

Submitted

This game is interesting to me in a lot of ways. Here's some things I noticed:

When I ran to one side, attacked and mid attack pressed the button to go to the opposite side, the character would stay locked in place after the attack for a couple of seconds before moving. That could get you in some nasty situations if there were more enemies.

I also noticed that, when attacking the enemies from a certain distance, they'd stay still in place for a short while like they got stunned, which is fine. However, when they got attacked whilst being a little closer to me, they'd still go after me whilst being attacked and would end up damaging me. I'm not sure if that's intentional, so I thought it'd be worth to point it out.

As people have stated, the control scheme can be quite tricky. An idea would be maybe to, instead of pressing E or Q multiples times to get the color you want, use E or Q to select the primary or secondary color slot, and use the mouse scroll to scroll through the color options of the primary or secondary slot. Maybe for unequipping, double right click? It's a possibility, though I'm unsure how that would be properly translated to keyboard only, gamepad or even touchpad for that matter.

Alternatively, you could make a hotkey to mix between Primary/Secondary Color Mode, and Mixed Color mode, with the same idea of using mouse scroll to go through colors. Though, that would take away from having the player learn and handpick the different color combinations. Just throwing some ideas out here, maybe they'll spring a new idea for you.

I like the different concepts of this game. You can make so many things with this! Certain projectiles that can only be blocked by swinging a certain color, platforms that the player can only stand on when having a certain color on their brush, attacks that the player can dash through safely when having selected a specific color. I really like the idea of the area's color being restored, and it'd be interesting to see that in more complex environments. Imagine a forest receiving that treatment, for example!

The spritework's nice and is able to convey very clearly what's happening. I also really like the design of the main character! It's simple and yet has quite a bit of character.

The boss is an interesting concept to show a little of what the game could do, and I don't think there's much I can say about it without boiling things down to the game only having 2 weeks to be developed. I think there's a lot of potential you can tap into with this and I enjoyed my time with the game. Really nice work!

Developer (1 edit)

Aww man! thanks for the feedback and the kind words! Yeah I've been working on some iterations of controls and testing a few concepts for sure. Thanks for the suggestions there!

The AI for the game is a bit wonky and it's on my radar to fix. There's a bug  happening with their velocity depending on distance or something.

Also, that's funny you mention blocking projectiles with color, because one of the prototypes I made in this last year was a robot that could absorb projectiles and attacks based on the type of projectile incoming, this would refill your ammo meter. So porting that over to this game woudn't be super complicated. Could be blocking or could be like reflecting it back like pong.

Submitted(+1)

Awesome idea and game overall! I really like it, and I think a lot of people in the comments already expressed a lot of the reasons why. The issue I had was that there are no save points, so going back to the beginning of the level, especially when I already was near the end was a bit painful. Apart from that I think the itch page could use some screenshots or gifs! Right now it just doesn't sell how great of a project this is.  Good job on this entry!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah the reload on level was kinda a last day addition and never added more because it's a jam game. I hadn't really thought about doing screenshots or gifs. But probably should do that.

Developer (2 edits)

FYI for anyone that's posting in the future:

1. Bug fix for the player character flying off the map after death in level 2. 

2. Bug fix for Audio not freeing on reloading of the level. (don't ever import as a "loop" for your sound fx unless it needs to play in the background. Just hoping that calling "stop()" on the stream will work. Control it in a process loop and play it in the "frame")

3. Controls are on my radar and I'm actively looking into more ergonomic ways to swap between colors.

Thanks for playing! Also, if you comment and I haven't played your game I'll have a link to go play yours :)

Submitted(+1)

What a nice game. I saw your interview with Amanuesis and had to give it a go myself. Though a few hiccups here and there, the game is fun and very enjoyable! I gotta give you kudos for the music and audio in general, very satisfying and comfortable to listen to.

If you're planning on updating this project, I'd love to have a dedicated button for the secondary painting, brings a lot of speed to gameplay. Though I don't know if it aligns with your vision.

Anyway, great job! Love to see such nice projects!

Developer

Thank you! Appreciate that so much! Yes there's going to be an overhaul on the controls. I think like a swap button between secondary and primary or something. To keep the attack button the same. But ya controls are gonna be overhauled after this jam for sure!!

Submitted(+1)

REALLY cool mechanic! I love mixing colors to defeat the enemies and solve puzzles! It was well executed! The graphics are nice and the audio is good! Really cool entry! Congrats!! :D

Developer(+1)

Thank you! I really appreciate the comment! It means alot

Submitted(+1)

I really loved the game, there were a few bugs but nothing I am sure you cant fix post jam. Great entry!

Developer(+1)

Yup, unfortunate. Bugs happen. Thanks for playing it and for your feedback!

Submitted(+1)

That's a cool concept.  Unfortunately I was playing on a laptop and do not have a middle mouse button so I got stuck.  Would have been interesting to see where it was going though!

Developer(+1)

Yep. Controls are something I'm experimenting with. You can also use R/F/V for mix, "paint", and clear mixed paint.

Submitted(+1)

very interesting idea, from a technical aspect, here's some small things i've noticed:

The middle mouse button isn't a great button to use for unmixing, because on my mouse that actually maps to pressing the scroll wheel which doesn't register half the time, i found it was generally more reliable to just swap colors.

The UI for showing what the primary and secondary colors are are also somewhat tricky, during combat i found myself just running away trying to figure out what color or combination of colors i'm supposed to have? perhaps it'd be more intuitive to use the triangles of keys "1-2-q" and "3-4-e" so you don't have to rotate through a color wheel? on controller that could be a combination with a trigger and a flick of the right stick? or perhaps it'd already help to put the UI elements near the player so you don't need to look away to find the color combination?

Taking damage might also benefit from better feedback, at one point i was wondering if the palettes were indicating my health, or the number of rooms i had left to complete because the hitboxes were a little odd,

Also when i died i respawned in the wall and flew off the map.

Still, a great start ;)

Developer

Thank you! I really appreciate this feedback! Yeah the flying off the map bug I've fixed, super weird that the collisions and physics were still happening after scene reload.

I've been trying to figure out how to make the controls more ergonomic, because I know it's not great, so this is great feedback. When I was creating the idea I was thinking like DMC weapon switching so you have to rotate through everything, but in DMC you don't need to match colors so more direct access to which color you need would be better for sure. So maybe a "wheel" like system would be better. We'll keep iterating.

Submitted(+1)

Wonderful mechanics! It's a great take on the theme and is really fun, I enjoyed playing it! The boss was a bit easy compared to the other two levels, but it's great that you managed to do all of this in your first game jam, congrats!

For me, the most interesting part is the music/sound effects, I wish I could make amazing and relaxing tracks like this

Developer

Thank you! I really appreciate that. Yeah the boss def could use a difficulty increase for sure. I've got some ideas, like taking away the safe spots and increasing the fire rate as the fight continues.

Yeah I'm a musician so that was my favorite but also most stressful part of the jam because I wanted it to be good and wanted to learn how to synth everything from scratch. 

Submitted(+1)

one of the best take on the color spreading interpretation of the theme I tried on this jam. the artstyle works great with the gameplay and the color mixing is quite challenging. I adore the music, has a great bittersweet vibe to it. great entry!

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you! I appreciate you playing. The music was the most stressful and my favorite part of the jam. I'm happy the vibe I was trying to get across with the sound and music is doing just what I wanted.

Submitted(+2)

Very fun, mixing the colours mid battle was surprisingly intense and the art style as a whole was really solid. Only recommendation I'd give is adding more feedback for when you take damage,  sorta missed it the first few times haha. Congrats on a great submission!

Developer

Thank you! Appreciate the feedback. I'm not very good at art and am totally learning all that shit so your comment is encouraging. Yeah I was trying to do something simple for visual feedback last minute and it just wasn't working. I've got a fix that gives better feedback like knockback and flashing to make it clear you're getting bopped.

Submitted(+1)

Great game, had a great time playing it! Felt somber and cathartic in a way. Would be cool if the paint you splashed also remained on the level.  Unfortunately had a bug after dying, I think I clicked to attack while being respawned and it launched me off the side of the screen. Other than that great job!

Developer(+2)

Yeah somebody else had this issue as well. I've fixed it in a new build. The enemies are pushing against you as you die, so hilariously it launches the character off screen and the colliders don't work. Very weird. Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

This is really creative! I liked the jaggy 8-bit style to the sprites, the mechanic seems solid provided you know your primary colours at least! It definitely seems like a controller would be the way to go here. I thought the music was chill and matched the vibe. Absolutely a concept worth exploring further. I liked the tutorial approach (in-game instructions) and don't really have any criticisms for this prototype. Nice submission!

Developer

Thank you! Yeah this is my first time drawing/animating sprites from scratch that I used in a game so this is really encouraging. I need to figure out better keyboard/mouse controls for sure.

Submitted(+1)

That was fun! It's a good concept, the game gets tough in a few parts! Specially when the robots are out to kill me while I try to find the right color combination! x3
The boss was fun to beat too. Nice job, congrats on the entry~ :3

Developer

Thanks for playing! Your comment is super encouraging! I had fun making the boss, I really wanted to go back and update the art and add another mechanic for him but just ran out of time. 

Submitted(+1)

Fun game, I thought changing colors to fight enemies mid-combat was super fun. The boss was awesome too. I did have a bug when I died on level two where I respawned out of bounds, but other than that, no issues.

Developer

Thank you! Yeah after you discovered that bug I was able to reproduce it consistently. Frustratingly the enemies basically somehow continue to apply velocity to the player AND push it through the wall after the scene is reloaded somehow?? So making sure I reset the velocity fixed it.

Submitted(+1)

Cool game, I like the undertones of the message. The pixel art is clean. Has the right amount of combat, could maybe use more puzzles based on the mechanic? The color mechanic is great but seems a bit clunky or unintuitive to switch  colors, but I'm not sure how I'd make that better myself. Boss fits with the mechanic well. Music fits style and is pretty sick. Overall good job.

Developer

Thank you! Hearing the pixel art is clean is really inspiring and encouraging! There's an additional mechanic that I wanted to add where the player would lose access to certain colors after going through colored areas. But I need to refactor a bit to get this to not be a nightmare. The controls seem to be the most feedback I've received. I need to figure out how to make that smoother and more ergonomic for sure.

Submitted(+1)

This is really cool, I love the art style and music for it, the second level was really tricky with that amount of enemies. I really enjoyed the quick thinking that needs to be done for combining colors. Although I think the boss fight could have been a bit more challenging, I did it without taking damage, I think it would've been improved if the timing between attacks got quicker, the less HP it had or something of that sort, and maybe an attack where 2 beams fired at the same time. And there was a safe area in the bossroom, which I feel shouldn't have been possible, to keep the player more on their toes. But overall very enjoyable!

Developer(+1)

Thank you! You're comment is very encouraging! Yeah I wanted to implement more mechanics for the boss, but just ran out of time.