CMYK Game | Devlog
2026-02-16
CMYK was inspired by retro arcade shooters, like Space Invaders, and a game a friend made over ten years ago called GRB. In GRB, the player character controls a ship, much like CMYK, and changes colours to shoot at and destroy the incoming asteroids. I wanted to create a more refined version of my friends game, with a narrative, and I decided to expand the colour palette from Green, Red, Blue (GRB) to Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key.
I had sketches and an initial idea for a narrative, but only recently started working on the game in concrete terms. As I began to develop the game using Godot 4 I had a bit of trouble finding my old notes for the narrative. I decided to focus less on the exact details I laid out before, and focus on the core theme which I recalled vividly.
The story is that the colours lived in harmony, in a time before time, in a place not exactly like our cosmos. There were celestial beings which could colour anything as they wished. White, the ruler of the colours dominated, everywhere the colours turned they were but a spot on the canvas of White. Over time, resentment grew, and an aspect of the colours began to coalesce. Their perceived domination and diminutive place to White breeded animosity. This negativity, budding off the colours, became Key.
Key's fortune was it's capacity to negate other colours. It too like White found itself filling all of space with itself. While White pleaded with the other colours to work to stop the menace of Key, they resisted. Their resistence, after a time, weaned. But not without consequences. By the time their negativity had completely left them, joining Key, making it more powerful, it was too late. Key dominated the cosmos, reigning supreme and disabusing any notion of allowance for other colours. White became weak, they could hardly find themselves anywhere.
This is where the colours, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow teamed up with what was left of White to create a vessel capable of subduing the menace of Key. This is where our story begins, controlling this vessel and venturing through space, destroying the obstacles Key puts in your way, to restore balance to the colours, and ultimately, the universe.