3Color Drain is out: how a paint-cleaning prototype became a city to save
12 October 2026
Rainbow City, half drained. Baron Blank took the colour; you take it back.
Color Drain went live on Google Play on 7 October 2026. It is free, you play it with one finger, and a level takes two to four minutes. This post is the story of how it got there, because a month before launch it was a different, and much quieter, game.
The August build
In August, Color Drain was a good feeling and not much more: an object on a white block, a vacuum nozzle, and paint to suck off until the surface was clean. Testers liked the first minute. Nothing in it said why the paint was there, and nothing made the next level feel different from the last.
The same idea, one month apart: the August build on the left, the launch build on the right.
What we rebuilt in September
So in September we kept the one thing that worked, the drain itself, and rebuilt everything around it.
A villain. Baron Blank has drained the colour out of Rainbow City. Every level is a corner of the city to give back, district by district.
Blots. The paint stopped being a stain and got eyes. The first world has nine kinds of Blot, from plain paint to Crust, Foam and Jelly, and each one asks for a slightly different motion of your finger.
Re-bloom. When the last drop goes, the object does not turn white. It blooms back into its own colour, and the street fills in around it.
Re-bloomThe Siphon, level 100200 levels, two worlds
What is in the game today
200 levels in 20 chapters, across two worlds. Rainbow City ends at level 100 with Baron Blank’s Siphon, a boss fight in three phases. The Golden Dunes end at level 200 with Viscountess Drab. Every level gives up to three stars for a clean, quick drain, and the core game plays offline.
It is free to play. There are ads: rewarded videos you choose to watch and, for players 18 and over, an ad between some levels, which the No-Ads Pass removes. There are optional purchases too. Players under 16 get Offline Play: no ads, no purchases and no account.
Update (24 October 2026): from version 2.3.14, every player outside Family mode can see an ad between some levels, which the No-Ads Pass still removes. Players under 16 now get ads too, from Google AdMob only and never personalised, and can buy things through Google Play or the App Store, with a grown-up checking every purchase first. They still have no account, and Family mode still has no ads and no purchases.
What is next
A one-thumb joystick mode is coming soon, for anyone who would rather steer the nozzle than drag it. After that the road goes on: the plan is a boss every hundred levels, on the way to level 1000. When we wrote this, the iPhone version had no date; it came out on the App Store on 14 October 2026, as Color Drain: Paint Rescue.
If you play it, tell us how it went in the community: which Blot you could not stand, which level made you put the phone down. We read all of it. Daniel and Dary
2A place to talk to us: the player community is open
14 September 2026
Until today the only way to reach the studio was an email address at the bottom of a page. That is fine for a bug report and useless for a conversation. So there is now a community at rdd-labs.com/community: a small forum where players, testers and the two of us talk in the open.
What it is: six boards. Announcements from the studio, a closed-test board only testers can see, ideas with votes so we can see which ones people actually want, bugs with a short template (device, build, steps), support, and a corner for everything else. A question can be marked answered. A thread with the Studio mark was written by one of us.
What it deliberately is not: another password. You join with your email address, we send a link, you tap it, and you are signed in for thirty days on that device. If you already get our launch mail, the link in it signs you in with one tap. Hebrew and English both, and the forum follows whichever you chose.
The rules are short and public. Reports go to a person, not a queue. An account can be deleted from its own settings page, and when it is, the posts stay and the name does not. Nothing is sold and nothing is tracked beyond what the privacy policy already says.
Why now, a quarter before launch: closed testing gave us a few dozen people who know the game better than anyone outside the room, and their notes were arriving one email at a time. A place where a bug report is seen by the next person who hits it, and where "this level is too hard" can collect votes, is the cheapest tool we did not have. The first thread is up: Closed Testing – Alpha. Come and tell us what to fix.
1Eleven ways this website can fail its own build
13 September 2026
Most of what a studio website says is a claim with a shelf life. A launch window. How many people work here, and where. Which phones the game runs on. Every one of them is true the day it is written and quietly wrong some months later, and nobody notices, because nothing breaks.
So we turned the claims into tests. Eleven scripts run on every push, and each one fails the build for a different kind of untruth.
The launch dates have to agree in three places at once: the copy a visitor reads, the structured data a search engine reads, and the plain-text file an AI answer engine reads. Change one and the build stops until the other two catch up.
Every design-target number the site publishes is declared in a single file. If any page renders a different figure, the build names the file and the line.
Every page that describes the company has to describe the same company. Two hand-maintained copies of one fact drift apart, and neither page looks wrong when they do.
Anything the site asks a browser to fetch early has to exist. A preload pointing at a renamed font is the worst of both worlds: a 404 fetched early, the real file still arriving late, and a console warning that reads like a false alarm.
The sitemap has to be honest about dates. A stale one is an active request to Google not to recrawl the change, which is the opposite of what a sitemap is for, and it is worst exactly when it matters most.
The one we are proudest of is the smallest. The site publishes a target cost per install, written as a comparison: less than a certain number of cents. In Hebrew, laid out right to left, the comparison sign flips. Same characters, same order, rendered as though we were claiming more rather than less. Three separate checks passed. The number on screen said the opposite of what it meant. Now a value like that has to be isolated as its own left-to-right run, and the build fails if it is not.
Today one of the eleven caught us in a way it could not have before. The sitemap guard compares each page against git history, and git only knows about history, so before you commit it reports the old date, the dates match, and the check passes. Then the commit lands, the answer becomes today, and the build goes red for a one-character fix you were holding in your hands ten seconds earlier. It cost us two red builds in a single day. An uncommitted edit now counts as shipping today, so it fails while the fix is still free.
None of this makes the game better. It makes the things we say about the game harder to get wrong, which for a studio nobody has heard of yet is most of the job.
