Color Thieves

You can lift color off anything the Authority owns, just by touching it. Slip through a gap in the wall at night, drain a fountain between patrols, and feel the color glow inside you as you run for home before first light.

Prisma is a city split by the Gradient wall. North of it, the Authority's avenues blaze with color it sells by grade. South of it lies the Grey Quarter, where your street is grey and so is your house. Lantern Street is home: Sienna keeps the stair down to the root and teaches you her one rule, Cadmium calls the patrol windows over channel three, and the Curator's voice announces the season's colors from the public screens. Wardens walk the bright side in pairs with lanterns. They search and they give chase, but they never touch anyone, and they never cross the wall.

With up to three friends you choose a night, slip through a maintenance gap or a drain, and lift color in the seconds between patrols: a slow count of two with your hand on a rose bed or a fountain's rim. The more you carry, the brighter you glow and the easier you are to spot. Bank it by crossing back through the wall, then go in again, as often as the clock allows. Get caught and you simply let go of what you carry, and a crewmate can save the spill.

Color here is a substance, and it does not last. Paint your house with it and it fades by grade, in days for the cheap stuff and weeks for the best. Pour it into jars and it keeps forever. Give your deepest jars to the root beneath Sienna's house and they rise, braid together and wake a mote, a small creature of living color that rides on your shoulder and learns new colors as you lift them. Stolen color fades; color given back grows.

The first release is Lantern Street, a hub of eight narrow houses with a shared mural wall and market stalls, and Map 1, Vermillion Avenue in the Red Quarter, with its rose garden, its fountain, the post office roof and the gaps and drains in the wall. Three more night maps are planned: the opera house on Gold Avenue, the Botanical Conservatory and a weekly Heist Night at the Citadel's gold door. You steal only from the Authority, never from a person and never from another player.

Three collections grow side by side and never reset: a jar library of 32 pigment slots from Discount to Prismatic, a mote book of 12 color pairs, and the 12 surfaces of your house, which bloom one by one for good. Requests wait for you, the Authority repaints the wall in a new seasonal shade every Saturday, and nothing is lost if you miss a week.

Based on The Color Thief by Davide Fiorenza: the lift by touch, the patrol windows and the rule never to take color from a person all come from the novel.

Color Thieves is a finished game design for Roblox that Greenlight Games plans to build in-house.