Colors! 3D Developer Diary and 3D Painting Released
Although we don’t yet have a release date, Colors! 3D seems to be gaining some significant momentum on the awesome scale as developers released their first diary today. In it, they discuss their progress with the soon-to-be eShop title, as well as how a 3D painting application actually works. Be sure to check out the downloadable 3D painting at the end!
Welcome to the first hopefully many Colors! 3D development diaries. In the time left to the release, I will try to give some insight into what’s gone (and goes) into the development of this… game-app-play-thingy. Yep, we are not really sure how to categorize it either, but that’s ok – that’s one of the things we like about it.
But first, I know that many of you are asking. We still don’t have a release-date or a price. This is the first time we are releasing something for the Nintendo 3DS eShop (well, duh), and there are still things we haven’t figured out. We are feverishly working getting things ready, but there is still a little bit to go before it can go into Nintendo’s submission.
So first off, I wanted to talk about this crazy notion of painting in 3D. This is obviously the key ingredient with our plan to bring Colors! to the 3DS. As far as we know, it hasn’t really been possible for people to paint in 3D – digital or otherwise (except for painting on layers of glass, that is).
Key to us was to keep Colors! as a pure painting app. We didn’t want to make it complicated or technical just because we added a third dimension. So, our solution to that was to reuse the idea of layers in 3D. Layers are something that most people who have used commercial image editing programs should be familiar with, so it didn’t seem like a stretch to find a good way to implement this.
We gave each layer a depth, so by choosing which layer to paint on, you chose which depth it appears at. Simple but powerful (and comes with the added bonus that if you just want to paint in 2d, you can still use the layer functionality because of the depth slider on the 3DS).
But, rather than trying to explain things, let me just show you instead. Here’s a painting that you might recognize:
This painting, painted by Munin, was painted in 3D. You can view it by downloading the MPO here, put it on your 3DS’s SD card and view it in the Camera app. If you don’t want to use your 3DS, you can find a wiggle version here… but it is way cooler on the 3DS. If you look closely, you should be able to see the individual layers. Colors! 3D supports five layers, which were about as much as I could cram into the memory at the 854×512 resolution you will be able to paint in.
I’m very happy how the whole 3D thing turned out and I can’t wait until 3D paintings start appearing in the gallery. As always with Colors!, seeing all the cool stuff being posted there is the reason why I love working on this project.
That’s it for now! Be sure to check back for more progress reports, and subscribe to the Collecting Smiles Feed!
