BLOBBO/docs/IDEA.md

GLOBBO — paint-buff blob racing

Captured 2026-07-17. Raw idea, pre-design.

Elevator pitch

Fall Guys × Splatoon. Friendly white blobby dudes (Michelin-man-ish, fewer rolls) race a giant absurd Rube-Goldberg obstacle course. Paint cannons along the course spray colour; whatever sticks to you matters — your relative % coverage of each colour is your buff/skill loadout. The course paints you, and being painted changes how you play the course.

Core mechanic — paint as loadout

• 7 primary colours, each mapped to a buff/effect (e.g. mostly-red = on fire / speed burn, blue = ?, green = ?, etc.)
• Buffs scale with (or unlock at) relative % of total coverage — probably a minimum threshold so trace splatter doesn't flicker buffs on/off.
• Secondary blends: adjacent colours mix (red+yellow zones on your body, or overall ratio ≈ orange) → way more permutations than 7. Mastery = deliberately building a blend, not just grabbing one colour.
• Course gives repeated chances at each colour → routing decisions: detour for the paint you want vs. straight line.

Counterplay / paint economy

• Detergent bubbles on course: cleanse (full or partial?) — reset a bad mix.
• Bumping other players smudges paint off/onto each other — contact matters, griefers can wipe your carefully built loadout, or you can steal/share colour.
• Open Q: does smudging transfer colour (I take some of yours) or just remove? Transfer is funnier and more strategic.

Tone / physics

• Gravity-heavy, Rube-Goldberg-esque, out-of-scale props (comically huge and tiny things) — absurd and funny, not sweaty.
• Blob physics: soft-body wobble is half the comedy (see Fall Guys, Gang Beasts, Human Fall Flat).

Course as machine (the extra Rube Goldberg twist)

• Players are the marbles: contraptions are triggered by blobs, not timers. See-saw → boot → bucket → conveyor → paint dump on the tunnel below. Everyone upstream is constantly (accidentally or deliberately) rigging the course for everyone downstream.
• Paint = weight: coverage adds mass. Heavy blobs sink pressure plates and tip see-saws but wobble slower / launch shorter. Merges the paint system and the contraption system into one — route for colour and for mass, and detergent bubbles become tactical weight-drops, not just buff-resets.
• Colour-keyed machinery: some mechanisms only respond to a blob of their colour (mostly-green blob turns the green valve → shortcut opens for them and anyone tailgating). Emergent temporary alliances, no UI.
• The course remembers: triggered contraptions stay tripped / reset slowly; sprayed paint lingers on surfaces as slip/grip zones (Splatoon-style). The back of the pack races a messier course than the leaders — chaos as natural rubber-banding.
• Readability rule: every chain reaction telegraphs for ~0.5s (winding gears, teetering buckets) so getting flattened reads as funny/earned, never random. Random deaths are what make ragdoll racers rage-inducing.

Scale play (environment scale as a mechanic, not just art)

• Scale zones: shrink sections where you race inside the machine (marble runs, domino chains, between gears); giant sections where you stomp over a model town and the tiny racers dodge your footsteps.
• A colour controls size (e.g. purple = grow, pink = shrink) — plugs into weight/contraption systems: big = heavy, triggers plates, blocks paths, easy paint target; small = light, pipe shortcuts, hard to hit, flung far.
• Paint stretches with you: growing dilutes coverage % (surface area up, paint spread thin, maybe flakes off for others to grab); shrinking concentrates it. Size trades directly against your buff loadout.
• Players as course furniture: a giant blob is a platform/obstacle/ counterweight for tiny blobs — the machine incorporates the players.
• Prior art: Superliminal (perspective scale tricks), Katamari (scale escalation), Grounded (tiny-scale traversal).

Physics zones & surfaces (everything is goo/viscosity)

• Gravity switches: contraption outputs, not fixed — a lever flips gravity for a zone. Heavy painted blobs slam to the new floor, light clean blobs drift. Ceiling-running through upside-down oversized rooms.
• Underwater: buoyancy = inverse weight. Clean blobs float across the top (fast lane), paint-heavy blobs sink (slow lane, better pickups?). Water slowly rinses paint — underwater shortcuts cost loadout.
• Zero-g / space: momentum pinball; paint floats as wobbly globs in the air — fly through one to wear it. Mid-air coating unique to zero-g.
• Honey: slow but sticky = climb walls/ceilings. Traversal tool.
• Oil: fast, no steering, luge. Fire-buff blob crossing oil ignites a trail behind them — emergent trap-laying.
• Mud = anti-paint: coats you brown, masks colours, suppresses buffs until washed off. The debuff you wear; makes water sections double-edged.
• Theme glue: players are goo, environment fights back with other goo. One coherent viscosity playground, not a gimmick grab-bag.

Open questions

• Buff table for the 7 primaries + which blends do what.
• Threshold model: min % to activate? dominant-colour-only? top-2 blend?
• Is 100% one colour a super-state ("all red = on fire") with a downside (visible, targetable, one bubble ruins you)?
• Player count / real-time netcode (Fall Guys did 60; soft-body + paint sim + 50 players online is the hard engineering problem).
• Does paint also affect the course (Splatoon-style ink on surfaces = grip / slip zones) or only the player?
• Anti-cheat from day one — cheating is literally what soured Fall Guys.

Prior art

• Fall Guys — the racing/format template (the game John couldn't name).
• Splatoon — paint identity, coverage %, but coverage is territory not self.
• Micro Machines / Re-Volt / Toy Commander — out-of-scale courses: tiny racers in giant everyday environments (breakfast tables, supermarkets, a whole house). The scale-absurdity tone reference.
• (Not these but adjacent: Army Men, Toy Soldiers — toy-scale combat, not racing.)
• Key novelty: coverage is measured on your own body and is your skill kit.