BEHIND THE GAME
Original artwork, deterministic days, honest scoring.
Toon Shade is a small browser game about reconstructing color from visual memory. This page documents what the game does, where its artwork comes from, and what its score can—and cannot—tell you.
What makes the game original
The cast is not copied from a television series, film, game franchise, emoji set, or remote image library. The illustrations are generated in the browser from SVG shapes created for Toon Shade. Five reusable drawing templates—critter, hero, magic, creature, and space—provide structure without making every character identical.
Each of the 40 character records supplies a name, world, target part, reference HSL color, memory clue, scene palette, and visual variation. The renderer combines that data with the appropriate template. This keeps the artwork lightweight while allowing every round to use a recognizable character and a precise recolorable region.
How the daily challenge is selected
The game turns the current UTC date into a numeric seed. A small deterministic pseudo-random generator uses that seed to shuffle the cast, and the first five records become the day’s sequence. Because the process starts from the same date everywhere, players receive the same daily characters without a server, account, or database.
Practice mode works differently. It can sample the full cast or only one world, and it is designed for repeat play. The daily result is stored locally so the interface can show whether today’s challenge has already been completed.
How color scoring works
The player edits hue, saturation, and lightness because those controls are understandable as separate visual ideas. For comparison, both the reference and guessed HSL values are converted to sRGB, then XYZ, then CIELAB coordinates. The game calculates the straight-line Delta E 76 distance between those Lab coordinates.
A smaller distance receives a higher score. The game maps distance to points with an exponential curve and rounds the result:
This score is a game mechanic, not a color-vision diagnosis or laboratory measurement. Displays differ, viewing conditions differ, and Delta E 76 is a simple model rather than a complete description of human perception.
Design and accessibility choices
- Native range inputs make the color controls keyboard-operable and usable with common assistive technology.
- Text labels accompany score colors, character worlds, target parts, and game states.
- The layout adapts from desktop to phone-sized screens without requiring a separate app.
- A reduced-motion media query minimizes transitions and animations when the operating system requests it.
- The game uses no sound, so understanding a round does not depend on hearing.
Accessibility is an ongoing process. If a control or explanation creates a barrier, it should be treated as a product issue rather than a player error.
Editorial principles
Public guides on this site are written specifically for the game and its mechanics. They should explain something a player can verify or use: how the controls work, why colors differ, how the cast is constructed, or how data is handled. The site does not publish scraped character biographies, franchise summaries, or bulk pages generated only to host advertisements.
Corrections to the methodology should be reflected both here and in the implementation. Privacy questions can be sent to support@tinygiantapps.com.