Day 1

The theme: Make a game in which COLOR is the MOST IMPORTANT MECHANIC

Even though the theme is optional for WeekSauce, I did want to try and follow it as much as possible. After some less than inspired ideas, I settled on a farming style game where you breed different coloured slime creatures to fulfil orders similar to games like Overcooked. 

Mostly today has been focusing on getting the basic ideas written into something coherent, and prototyping some basic systems in Game Maker. The plan is for the final game to include:

• Slime behaviour using a finite state machine where they wander around, seek food, and seek a mate 
• Slime breeding mechanics where two slimes blend their colours to create a new creature 
• Random order generation (so a customer wants a blue slime, then a green, etc)
• Foods which can change slime colours when fed to them 

I'm undecided what the "lose" condition will be, maybe if you run out of money? Fail too many orders? I'm not sure, but hopefully that will become clear as I test a bit more. I have been watching my partner play a lot of stardew valley recently, so I think that might go some way to explaining the pastoral approach I've decided to take. The goal is basically manipulating the slimes biology to get slimes as close to a goal as possible, which I think has some potential. 

The only interaction I'm planning on adding is the ability for the player to pick up and move slimes/objects. This is already in the prototype in a basic format, as you can see beautifully rendered above. As it stands, slimes move around their environment, seek food, and eat when hungry. There's actually some fun accidental emergence where the player can carry food to lure the slimes into a specific location, which I like. 

The other thing I'm excited about is developing the colour blending system, I came across a cool paper discussing new ways of blending colours which function more like paints do in the real world. Helpfully, there is a python library licensed under Creative Commons which I'm hoping to adapt for my project.