The Color Thief
From the novel by Davide Fiorenza
The game we see here
You can lift color off anything you touch. Slip past the guards into the bright north of the city, drain a fountain or a rose garden in the seconds between patrols, and carry the color home through a gap in the wall. Paint your grey street back to life before the color fades, and fill enough jars to wake a creature made of living pigment.
Why this world
Steal-and-collect games with rarity tiers are one of the strongest patterns on the platforms we build for, and this book already works that way. Its color is a physical substance sold in grades that fade in days, weeks or months, which gives players a reason to come back. Its heists run on patrol timers and windows a few seconds long. And when the heroine stores too much stolen color in one place, it comes alive, so the creature players collect grows straight out of the story.
The book · Children & YA
Dawn in the Grey Quarter, and a twelve-year-old girl sits on a rooftop with a charcoal stick, drawing a skyline she has never been allowed to see in color. Iris lives in the half of Prisma the Chromatic Authority forgot — a city stripped of pigment, where butter is grey and laundry hangs like ash and her grandmother once painted murals before public color was outlawed.
Then Iris brushes a stranger's scarlet coat in the Border Market, and the red moves. It flows from the fabric into her fingertips, beneath her skin, alive. By nightfall she has painted the courtyard wall in stolen hues, and the neighbors gather at sunrise to weep at a brick they have walked past for decades.
With her colorblind best friend Cadmium handling logistics, Iris builds a black market in pigment — raiding the Upper Spectrum's rose gardens and cobalt awnings, selling color back to the people it was taken from. A small creature called Flicker coalesces from spilled dye and rides her shoulder, hungry. The Quarter calls her a folk hero. The Authority calls her a thief.
Then, in a single careless moment, Iris takes too much from the wrong person, and a stranger walks home in permanent grayscale. What is the difference between liberation and pillage when the thing you are moving is the warmth of the world itself?
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.