===Premise===

Alrighty. I came up with a game after two weeks of brainstorming. It involves colors, colors, and more colors. You play as a young upcoming artist who believes that the best art is black and white lineart with the absence of color. To him, color makes things too childish looking. One day, a friend gives him a paintbrush, telling him to just try it once. The guy decides to paint with colors one night, completely not caring. Just when he performs the first stroke across the canvas, he is suddenly transported into a world of lineart. Here, he is greeted by a pixie who reveals to him that he had just used a magic paintbrush. Unfortunately, the pixie isn't too happy to hear of his hatred for colors, so decides to teach him a lesson.

The guy has to get himself through this world of monochrome line art using his now enlarged paintbrush. Manipulating the three colors of red, yellow, and blue, he must overcome the many obstacles that present themselves in each level. Examples include defeating an enemy by attacking it with the paintbrush having the same color as the enemy (all enemies will be one color, or may shift between them, except for some bosses), coloring a boat to give it life so you can cross water, and other interesting concepts like this. The artist will even have to come to use the secondary colors of green, orange, and purple as the player becomes more familiar with the color system. Though the world is black and white, attacking objects, such as a tree, will color it in the selected color. Not only does this call the objects to come to life, but coloring all objects in a level will grant the player some type of reward.

The game is essentially a platform game, meant to be a steady to fast pace, reason because the player will have to keep track of what color they have selected (which the character will be visually colored as for better feedback), so it has some elements of strategy. The game mostly involves around using colors to progress. The player will be using only four buttons with the normal directional movements.

===So What's My Problem?===

Finding innovative ways to use this core feature of the game. The player will be able to select them real time by using two buttons to move the "color wheel" on the screen left or right to a selected color. There will be things with secondary colors that the player will have to attack with the two corresponding primary colors to activate or destroy (will be taught to the player as the game goes), and sometimes, they'll have to attack an advanced enemy (which will be notified), with a complementary color. So, for example, if the enemy is yellow, then the player has to attack it with purple. But because purple isn't on their color wheel, they have to make it by attacking the enemy with red then blue constantly.

One option was just making the player be able to make complementary colors through basically having two color wheels, then using a button to make those two colors mix into a secondary color, which can be turned on and off at will.

The draw of this game is that the player is making a boring line art colorbook world into a more lively picture. And the character, of course, learns through his journey the important of color.

I would just keep the 3 primary colors and then somehow mix them for the secondary colors.

Instead of two buttons for 2 color wheels, why not use 3 buttons each one corresponding to a primary color?

Then to shoot purple you press the red and blue buttons simultaneously. No 'wheel selection' required, you just shoot color!

If you haven't played Okami, I recommend you do, for inspiration. While it's not about colors, you do more or less bring a dead land to life using a paintbrush.

Other than that it sounds like a fun concept, with a minor quibble that I'm not sure about the ethics of forcing an artist who likes black and white art to use color, or the idea that things which aren't colored aren't really alive. I wonder if there would be a way to work in the concept (perhaps in a later level) that in some situations it is useful to strip colors away instead of adding them.

@loom: I was just thinking about this when I was sleep (which was why I got little sleep). I'll probably end up just doing that. I when I thought of that scheme, an alternative gameplay I thought up was making this into a Bobble sort of game where you used the three colors to eliminate colored objects, but I wanted this to be more adventure than just a strategy puzzle game.

@sun: I played it, and was the first thing to pop in my mind when I thought of the idea of this. However, you made a valid point about turning the concept on its head and teaching the value of having "too much color", too. Thus, there's also going to be an erase feature for the player which will come in the form of white paint. This will be a special power that the player accumulates on a gauge by painting objects in the level, and by pressing all three buttons at once, the player can turn on "White Out" mode. Another cool thing is also letting the player use "Black Ink" to create objects by hitting special signs, increasing the depth of gameplay.