Mondrian - Plastic Reality Windows, Mac game

The latest version of Mondrian – Plastic Reality has been released on itch.io and GameJolt. You can read the patch notes here.

Early Access 4 brings with it some major additions to game styling, both giving you more control AND introducing new, dynamic methods of styling levels. Let’s take a look at arguably the biggest addition to Mondrian Maker yet, painting.

The ability to individually paint blocks is one of the longest-requested features of Mondrian Maker, and though it was on track for EX5 next month, we bumped it ahead of schedule. The Painting features are comprised of six tools:

• Main Swatch: What you use for setting your paint color. Use the RGB sliders to adjust the swatch.
• Miniswatches: Allows you to store up to 8 colors for later use.
• Paintbrush: What you use to paint blocks. Paints them the color in the Main Swatch.
• Eyedropper: Allows you to set the Main Swatch to the color of any block, painted or not.
• Paintscraper: Allows you to remove painted color from a block.
• Varnish: Locks in all current block colors so they can’t be changed accidentally.

The icons for the new paint tools were designed by our new artist, Manning! Using the Paint tools, you can style your levels however you want. When you play the game, the blocks in your level will always come in Painted, regardless of color scheme.

Speaking of color schemes, we’ve also begun working on new ways for unpainted levels to look using dynamic color systems. First up is Analogous Colors! Unlike the Monochrome schemes (Red, Green, Blue, Grayscale), analogous colors will set the game to randomly choose any color on the RGB spectrum, and then select two neighboring colors to go along with it. For instance, if it selects Yellow, it will also select Yellow-Green and Yellow-Orange. We are only on the first pass of this system and will be improving it over time, as well as building in alternate scheme types (Triad and Tetrad specifically), but already it is creating some striking results.

On top of all these new styling features, we also have EIGHT new levels and two new background artworks produced by our new level builder Anna! All these new levels were built in Mondrian Maker and feature ramping difficulty for Block Types and Modifiers. The two new backgrounds are inspired by Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

We have a few more minor additions as well. Support for custom Gem Chests has been added, and some visual tweaks to menus have been made to help the selected menu item stand out more (lower opacity and size for unselected items). We have revamped the Block Pop particle system to be less processor-intensive, take up fewer objects, and be more cross-platform compatible for future versions. Mondrian Maker has also received new Tooltips and a new Instructions Page for the Painting tools. Make sure to read the Patch Notes for everything new, there’s a lot.

As always, thank you for playing, and we’re looking forward to seeing your newest Mondrian Maker Creations!

– Danny