What's Isle of Colors?

Hello, my name is Dávid and I'm the designer and developer of Isle of Colors.

This post is about the game, how it came to be, what went well and what didn't.

The board game

Yes, this game started as a board game. Actually, the video game version wasn't originally even supposed to get released, but I will come back to this later.

On May 29 a Coloring book contest on https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ started. The goal of the contest was to create a coloring board game that would end up in a coloring book. The only components you could use were bunch of dice and tokens, and of course - colorful pencils. I came up with a 2 player game about exploring islands. The rules were quite simple - roll a die, pick one of two colors and fill in spaces on your island. Then swap the color with your opponent and repeat. The depth of the game came with various scoring conditions for each color.

Contest ended and my game didn't make it to semi-finals. Never mind, I was confident that the game has potential and I kept working on it. I created better art, refined the rules, balanced the scoring. Now I'm trying to get the game published.

The video game

During this time I also wanted to get better at Unity and to actually finish a game. The rules for Isle of Colors were pretty straight forward, so I decided to turn it into a video game as well. Also, I wanted to utilize machine learning to help me with balancing the game. I started working on a prototype and soon I had a working system.

I wanted to structure my code better than in previous projects. I had a lot of experience in traditional programming, so I wanted to bring it into game development as well. I ended up with a project that I'm proud of. The game uses a state machine to manage the rounds of the game. UI is detached from the data behind it and utilizes event listening to update. This well structured code made it really easy to work on adding new features.

One of the main reasons I created this video game project was to use machine learning to balance the game. I wanted to create an AI that will learn and perfect the way it plays. I unfortunately couldn't make the Unity ML-Agents work on my computer. As a result I implemented a simple brute-force AI in the game, that can be pretty difficult to beat.

What's next

I want to keep the game updated with bug fixes and also new features. I'll be working on online multiplayer, as that is another part of Unity and video game development that I want to learn and get better at. The game is structured with multiplayer in mind, so integrating it shouldn't be problematic (famous last words).

Thanks for reading my initial dev blog for Isle of Colors. In another post I will get deeper into how I structured the game and also how designing the board game worked.

See you later.