Basic Block / Terrain Merge & the Artist's Palette Toy

Throughout Toy Box building, has anyone else wished that they could use a Terrain theme on a Basic Building Block? Or a Basic Block theme on a Terrain piece? The two lists already have a fair number of shapes in common. Perhaps they could be merged .

This could free up an entire Category of toys (after moving Blip Blocks, etc. to Instant Fun for example). But the combined list of themes would be unmanageable. Some might argue that the separate lists are already unmanageable, and with 3.0, 4.0, etc. the usability of that fundamental Artist's Palette icon comes into question.

There's already some filtering options within Spark mode to limit lists of toys on the edit ribbon. I haven't experimented yet to see if you can limit the themes. And are these filters associated with the user/builder profile, or with that specific Toy Box? Do you need to reset them every time you start a new box or re-load an existing one?

What if there was an Artist's Palette Creativi-toy that you could place down in a Toy Box that could store the themes used in that particular box? In its Properties you'd choose what toy Category it handled. You could choose say half-a-dozen slots of your "Toy Box Palette" for any given category that would make for quick selection during editing. You could plop down one of these Palette toys for each category and make the theming within each Toy Box considerably easier. Conceptually & visually, it would be more straightforward to have a particular Toy Box's subset of themes centralized within one or more Creativi-Toys.

Plus, what if there was a level of indirection within that Artist's Palette toy? What if toys were designated "theme 1", "theme 2", "theme 3", etc. You could program those particular themes into that Artist's Palette toy. The visual interface would keep it simple, and yet it would then be possible to make ALL themed pieces in the Toy Box programmatically re-theme-able in-game. . Push an Action Button for example, and have a third of the Infinity trees, half of the Terrain, and all of the Platformer toys change as part of a character's magical adventure. If the Palette was subsequently deleted or adjusted such that "theme #" was lost, the toys could "revert" to their default theme.

P.S. Still waiting for that curved Hedge corner in Plants to move over to Terrain so that it can be themed differently. That toy looks really cool; it gives walled areas a nice rounded feel .

I have been dying to see in-game changeable blocks/terrain. Oh the possibilities if say all of a sudden the green grassy terrain changed to frozen...instant winter wonderland. From black and white frankenweenie terrain to color as you progress.

^Same here! Imagine making a Frozen Toy Box and having all of the Frozen Flourish themed terrain change to grass when the player brings back summer! I've always wanted to do that!

^Exactly!

What if you could switch over to another Palette toy entirely?

Let's imagine that activating a Palette toy would transition to a different mode of theming, "limiting" each category of toy to say 10 themes at once. Until that first one was activated, Toy Box themes would work the same as before.

As an example, consider the addition of that first Palette toy for the Terrain category. Choose say 7 themes and leave 3 unused. Dynamically activate this Palette toy with an Action Button and all Terrain pieces are reviewed by the system. It would all be visual - your Palette toy would show the various selections in Properties. The system would need to ensure that there weren't more than 10 pre-existing themes, and that the chosen 7 could be represented - otherwise the activation would need to fail. The cutover would involve adding an extra level of indirection to these "10 slots" so that dynamic changes could occur. This way, Toy Boxes without the Palette toy would be unaffected (i.e. not broken ).

Add a second Palette toy for Terrain. Choose just 3 themes this time, in slots 2, 4 & 5. The positions are important because the system would change the themes according to the order of themes in the prior Palette toy. Positions 1, 3, & 6-10 would be unaffected.

Terrain Customization Power Discs could hopefully feed into any slot you wanted, and could also continue to provide "Theme All" option when the disc is first placed on the base.

This would add usability to theming by focusing the list on a given artistry palette. It might even help manage the Toy Box meter by limiting the number of themes used at once. It would add functionality to in-game theming changes really well. It would promote the general idea of Infinity's 3D artistry.

It would actually be compatible - if you never used the Palette toy at all, you'd have the full list of themes. If you activated a Palette toy, it would filter your theme selection and enable dynamic in-game theme changes whenever you'd activate a different Palette toy. If you subsequently removed all of the Palette toys, the Toy Box could revert to supporting all themes. It could even be as granular as Palette enablement for one category, but not for others.

(edited for dynamic cutover in order to maintain compatibility for existing Toy Boxes)

P.S. If you just wanted to dynamically change one theme to another, you could just have a Theme toy with Properties "Original" and "New" for a given category. That's a whole lot simpler, but wouldn't resolve the ever-growing scroll-time in selecting Block & Terrain themes.