If you fancy yourself as a right-brained creative type, there's a new mobile puzzle game that will tickle your artistic side and even teach you something.
Blendoku is a free game for iOS and Android that is a hybrid of puzzles like Sudoku and crosswords. Instead of filling your grid with numbers or letters, in Blendoku you organize colors in a gradient by shade, hue and saturation. If that is hard to entirely grasp, check out the trailer:
The levels start simple like those above, but soon your rows and columns will be intersecting in multiple places, and you'll have to find the meeting place of all the color swatches given to you on each level. When the puzzles get too tough, you can get a free hint, but using more than one per day requires an in-app purchase.
Blendoku was created by Lonely Few, made up of the two-man team of Rod Green and Yeong-Hao Han. Both worked at larger game studios — BioWare and Pandemic — before founding Lonely Few. Green says they were inspired to create Blendoku after thinking about color exercises from art schools.
"In one such exercise, students would be given a number of color swatches in a bag and fill out a chart based on hue, saturation, and value. It was kind of like filling out a jigsaw puzzle with colors," Green said. "With Blendoku, we took these concepts, sped up the process, and created a game out of it."
Their efforts have not gone unnoticed by art teachers everywhere. Green says they've received several notes from art teachers from elementary school to college who they have includedBlendoku in their lessons. He shared some of those with Mashable.
"Blendoku takes one of the difficulties of color theory — color mixing — and encourages users to have fun learning the basics without relying on paint. Along the way, users will also pick up some intuitive hints about color harmonies, too," wrote Richard Keyes, a color theory and design instructor at Art Center College of Design.
Green realizes that Blendoku's gameplay isn't friendly to players who are colorblind, but he and Han are working on a solution.
"Since the game is based on color gradients we're working on a way to 'shift' the colors out of the typical colorblind spectrum so everyone can enjoy the game," he says.
Blendoku is free now for iOS [iTunes link] and Google Play [Google Play link].
Image courtesy of Lonely Few
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