Color Sanctuary

(Submission for Minijam 183)

Time to craft some colors !

HOW TO PLAY :

You must insert all 4 colored gems in the sanctuary to get as close as possible to the target color (showed at the top right of the sanctuary, encased in gold).

On your first turn, you must put a gem in the bottom-left slot to initialize your starting color (showed on the top left of the sanctuary). When you do so, a second slot will appear : the effect slot.

You must then use your three last gems to reach the goal :

• Putting a gem on the color slot will blend its color to the current color (using the HSV mean of the two)
• Putting a gem on the effect slot will apply its effect to the current color (see the effect by hovering the gem)

The progress bar tracks how close your current color is to the target color, as well as the threshold from which your crafted color is deemed close enough.

Each step of the process destroys a gem, so try to plan ahead.

(Note: putting a gem in a slot while the other is already occupied may cause incorrect results, be sure to remove the other gem manually first  to avoid this bug!)

Help ! What is HSV ?

Colors in this game are represented through the HSV format (Hue, Saturation and Value), which is commonly used in computer science and algorithmic. You can think intuitively of each component as such :

• Hue is the base color, think red, yellow, green etc.. In our game, it is represented on the color wheel with angles.
• Saturation is how much "grey" the color is. A saturation of 0 will make the color fully grey. In our game, it is the rightmost side of our triangle.
• Value is how intense the color is. A value of 0 will make the color completely black, whereas a full value will make it more bright (depending on its saturation too). In our game it is the latitude of our triangle

The Wikipedia article about HSV is well written to go further about this (but rest assured, shouldn't be necessary to play our game).

CREDITS :

Anzo : Graphics and assets, code for color and game logics, sound implementation, game design

Ugu : Main code base, code for UI, Tooltips and game logics, game design

Comments about making this game (Math stuff) :

More math than wished was necessary - turns out defining a correct distance to judge colors isn't the best. we had colors with the opposite hue being considered because of hue and saturation less-perceptible at low value (which also why we opted for the HSV triangle instead of the square.)

Per game, there is exactly 192 combinations possible of crafting - considering how hard predicting colors transformation is, we made a "winning threshold" instead of a precise solution. More precisely : when a game begin, we first deal four random gems. Then, we choose one combination of operations, apply them internally to get a "target color". And then after, we search through all the other possible combinations, the 25 most close ones to this target color, and set the threshold to the farthest color of theses. This way, players have (if they would play randomly) a ≅13% chance to win.

I hope you will enjoy our entry as much as we had fun making it :D