Programmer / Game Designer
Color Thief is a short 3D puzzle platformer where you can change the color of objects to change their physics properties.Â
Our goal was to have a main mechanic focused around taking colors from objects and enemies and being able to use those colors in your arsenal to paint things (objects, enemies, maybe even yourself). Each color would change an attribute of the thing painted (gravity, bounciness, ability to fall/move, etc.)
I was in charge of programming and designing what each of the colors' attributes would be and how they would function. The blue color was originally going to give that particular object low gravity, but I realized that was really difficult to program in Unity in the time we had, so instead I made it so that an object painted blue would have no collision with the player, allowing them to just pass through the object. The red color could be painted onto an object to stop its movement/velocity, and it can also be used to grant collision back to an object that was painted blue. The green color makes objects bouncy, which could be used by the player to gain greater height. I felt that these colors attributes could work together in some interesting ways, like painting an object green and another blue so you could bounce on one object and gain enough height to pass through the other.
I really like how this game came together. We had to do a lot of descoping due to the many other projects that the team members, including myself, had commitments to. As a result, it's definitely much simpler and less ambitious than we planned, but I'm glad that we managed to keep the core idea intact with all of the descoping and I'm happy with what we accomplished. There's definitely a lot more we can explore and expand on with this concept. On my end, the color mechanics are pretty simple from a design perspective and were more of an interesting programming challenge that was really rewarding to figure out.