Dollop: Color Mixing Game

A color a day, the same one for everybody. Mix it out of six pigments, feed what you make to the creature that hatched from your first match.

Blue and yellow make green.

On a screen they make gray. Dollop is a puzzle about mixing paint, and the paint in it behaves the way paint behaves: the ratio matters, the order does not, and two parts blue to one part yellow lands somewhere different from one to one.

You are given a color. You pull paint out of the tray, push the blobs together, and watch the number fall as you get closer. That is the whole game.

FIVE WAYS TO PLAY

Zen. Colors one after another, for as long as you want. Nothing is timed and nothing is scored.

Daily. One color a day, the same one for everybody, and one attempt at it.

Blind. A few seconds to look, then the target is covered and you mix it from memory. One peek, ten seconds in.

Precise. The same colors, held to a tolerance most eyes cannot resolve. This is the one that will keep you there.

From Life. Photograph anything, point at a color in it, and mix that.

SOMETHING HATCHES OUT OF IT

The first color you match becomes a small creature, in that color. Everything you mix after that feeds it, and its DNA is the strip of every color it has ever eaten, in order. It grows slowly. It sleeps while you are gone. Nothing here can die, and nothing will notify you to say it misses you.

MADE TO BE QUIET

Every sound is a soft synthesized tone in a single pentatonic scale, so however they land on top of each other they stay consonant. Nothing is loud, nothing repeats exactly, and the audio mixes underneath whatever you were already listening to instead of stopping it.

FREE, WITH ONE OPTIONAL PURCHASE

Zen and Daily are free forever and are whole modes rather than a sample of one. A single purchase unlocks Blind, Precise and From Life, paid once and never again. No subscription, no advertising, and nothing that runs out and asks you to wait.

NOTHING IS COLLECTED

No account. No sign in. No analytics and no tracking. There is no networking code in the app at all, so it works exactly the same in airplane mode. Photographs used in From Life are read on your phone and never leave it.

Eleven languages. Every control is labeled for VoiceOver, and because the distance to the target is shown as a number, a color blind player can close in on a match by reading rather than by comparing.