Shape Orchard by Binney
Mix colours in the shape orchard and pluck the ripest fruit.

Inspired by the art of Wassily Kandinsky and the Bauhaus movement.


Instructions
Mix shape colours together until you have a bright red circle you can pick.
Arrow keys to move, spacebar to collect a circle, tab to switch the active circle.
Changelog
09/01/22: v1.0.4 Fixed the bug where you could continue to tab to a circle after it had been cleared
| Link | https://github.com/Binney/harvest |
| Play online | https://binneygames.itch.io/shape-orchard |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/shape-orchard |
Ratings
| Overall | 62th | 3.84⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 126th | 3.54⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 7th | 4.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 276th | 3.06⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 14th | 4.385⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 266th | 1.905⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 34th | 3.958⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
I Love the game esthetic a lot, I got even surprised when it gets Kandinsky-like.
It is a well polished, original and relaxing experience! :D
Want to mention: I don't know if there was supposed to be sound, but I could not hear any.
A small 'bug' ? : When circles are validated they visually disappear but they can still be pushed around. They are just invisible :ghost:
> I don’t know if there was supposed to be sound, but I could not hear any.
Nope, I didn't have time sadly, there is no sound.
> A small ‘bug’ ? : When circles are validated they visually disappear but they can still be pushed around. They are just invisible
Ooh!!! Excellent spot. I have now patched this and will put a quick changelog in the game entry.
One thing I am not sure about is if there was no music/sounds? I didn't hear any but its possible it was broken for me. If you didn't have any that is of course fine, I'd just suggest opting out of the category, which you should be able to do even for the compo :).
controls were not super easy because the circles kept moving a bit, and sometimes, the time i have my hand on my mouse, it's not in the right zone anymore.
In the beginning I did not really know that I could move the spheres around. And once moving, I think the movement was a bit too floaty for my taste.
Graphics are awesome!
Yeah I'm not super happy about the movement controls. I played with it a bit and don't feel I nailed how I wanted it to feel. In particular I struggled not to have the circles bouncing around hyper fast!!
As for level design, I totally agree, I have a few ideas for ways to make it less "passive experience" and more "puzzle game" - e.g. formalising the colour mixing mechanisms. I hope to pick it up in a future weekend and flesh it out a bit :)
Plus obviously try and crib off other abstract artists for future levels (I think a set of Mondrian levels would be super cool...!)

and "Several Circles" (1926)

In fact all the colours in this game were eyedroppered from those 2 works.
I would love to do a Mondrian level though, I think it would work nicely with the line walls...

Or a Sonia Delaunay:

Or even (to be honest I don't like him that much but) a Damien Hirst. Imagine how much fun it would be going completely haywire knocking all these circles out of place!!!

I will be working on this game a bunch more so watch this space (not jam any more obviously though).
I really loved the twist in how after a while there was some gravity, and I feel like it could be expanded with different fields or areas behaving slightly differently. But not at all to make it a hard game or anything, but to add some more variation to add to the joy of navigating around the paintings.
As someone who barely ever manages to add music, and many times have made silent games, I should perhaps not say this, but I think some experimental music or if music was created based on movement of circle and its coloration would have added a lot to the mood of the game.
Very happy I found it and got to try it out
But i still like the idea of incorporating art in some way. And to be honest as much as im not that into it i love learning something new in tiny bits, so thank you for this lovely comment <3. Might sound weird but, maybe if you post updates for the game you can post some pictures that also inspired you for that current update like you did here. It would be really interesting to read!
And for the picture from Damien Hirst, if you get just a jpg of it, you can make a script in unity that can load a color at coordinate X*offset(the distance between circles). And spawn a circle at each of those coordinates with the given color! And there you go a really fast way of doing it! And i know its possible and easy since i did something like this a year ago! :)) And i can help you if you ever feel like doing it and get stuck!