Introducing Dropwise: Mix the Colour of the Day

Today Dropwise launches. It's the fifth daily game on polarcade, after Stränge, WhereSpoken, WhichCSS and Blueprint, and the first one about colour.

The concept

Every day there's a target colour and a shelf of paint tubes. Tap a tube to add a drop to your pot. The pot holds up to 20 drops, and when you think it matches the target, you submit. You get one submission a day, and your match score shows how close you got.
There's a catch: your pot isn't stirred until you submit. Each tube sits in it as its own blob that grows with every drop, so you have to picture the mix in your head. If you're not sure, you can take up to three tests, brush strokes on a test strip that show what the pot would mix to right now. There's no undo. If it goes wrong, you can only spill the pot and start again.
After you submit you see the ideal solution, and the simplest one: the fewest drops that still reach 95%.

Paint is not light

The tubes behave like real pigments, not like colours on a screen. Two blues can give very different greens. Phthalo blue is so strong that one drop in four of white is still a strong blue. Ultramarine and burnt sienna make a grey without any black. All of this comes from a spectral mixing model I built for the game, so what you learn in Dropwise mostly works on a real palette too.
Some days are theme days with a restricted palette, such as earth colours or printing inks. The first one comes on Saturday for Halloween.

The atelier

If you'd like to practise before you play, the atelier has a free learning path: 15 steps through the key rules of mixing paint. There you can take drops back out, turn on a live view of the mix, or peek at the solution. Supporters also get endless practice at two difficulty levels and free mixing with all 15 tubes.

Try it today

Dropwise is live now. Open it from the polarcade portal or go straight to the game and see how close you get.
This is the first release, so I'd really like to hear what you think. Feedback helps me make the game better.