New to Dehoarder 2 in the past two weeks is the garden management sub-game. With this system, all gardens on the property need attention at least daily in order to keep them looking their best. Gardens factor in to your house’s “score” for purposes of inspections and progress, and when well manicured will teem with beautiful flowers, but when neglected will become choked with weeds and dying plants.
Gardening is not an instantaneous affair. When you tend your plants with water, fertilizer, and weed killer, you will get some visual feedback that the job is done, though the effects on the plants will happen over time. Come back the next day, and you will find that watered and fertilized plants have grown taller and healthier, while plants sprayed with weed killer will have browned up and listed to one side. Repeat the process, and within a few days the weeds will disappear, and flowers will be huge, bright, and vibrant.
With gardening implemented, it was time to turn to some other home design opportunities. What happened next was a process resulting in a diverse and meaningful palette of custom home design colors.
What I noticed in my research was that each material seemed to have its own distinct palette of colors. Vinyl siding tends to be desaturated in color, with a few exceptions. Carpeting tends toward darker colors (low V in the HSV color space), with some notably bright exceptions. Bathroom fixtures have the opposite tendency. Civilization in general seems to have some aversion to certain highly-saturated greens and purples. I wanted to capture these distinctions, and present them juxtaposed with the normal level of Dehoarder absurdity.
I sampled colors from many different materials, and built a magic utility to reduce and combine similar colors, until I was left with a palette of colors with meaningful differences that were visible to the untrained eye, all the while tracking which colors are used with which materials. Then, I took each final color and gave it a correspondingly absurd name. Expect to see color names like “I Don’t Want a Pickle”, “Smokestacks and Ash”, “Mango Tango Foxtrot”, “Quit Yer Yammering”, “Fore!”, “Spinster Mermaid”, and “Pazuzu Black”.
I have palettes defined for carpet, hide, paint, porcelain, upholstery, and vinyl siding. I think this does it for custom materials that can be differentiated solely by color. Other customizable materials, like woodgrain, brick, wallpaper, and the like will need to be worked as actual full textures.
A proof-of-concept of the furniture customization is in place, and the next steps are to provide a UI for it, and undertake some redesign to make the remaining features easier to implement. I’m hoping that in the next 4-6 weeks I can do at least one iteration of each remaining major feature, and bring the game to a point where it is acceptable to release it to the wild as an alpha version.