Colors Live - #dev-log

Jens

Wed, 19th November 2025 at 3:48pm

As you might have seen, Colors Live v1.15 is out this week. It’s mostly a bugfix update, but the big goal was getting everything running smoothly on Nintendo Switch 2.

We’ve been trying to get our hands on Switch 2 devkits for a while now, but Nintendo is still keeping those pretty close. We’re eager to dig into all the fun new stuff on the hardware - higher resolution, HDR, and 120 Hz (and we even want to try the mouse support).

Even so, we managed to fix the SonarPen connection issue on Switch 2, so Colors Live now works great on it. It looks great on the bigger screen and just feels snappier and better. Try it out!

Jens

Sat, 2nd December 2023 at 3:52pm

We've updated the repainter on colorslive.com so it's much much faster than it used to be. We also took the opportunity to implement the 3D tilt feature that came into a recent Colors Live version. Press play, and then click and drag to see the individual layers!

Jens

Sun, 7th May 2023 at 8:11pm

v1.13 is now submitted. If it breezes through Nintendo's certification, it could be done within a week. If they encounter some problems it could be much longer.

Jens

Mon, 27th March 2023 at 6:46am

We're finally wrapping up v1.13. The big feature-additions are Layer Mods, that gives Transparency Lock, and #remix, which allows you to download a painting, remix it, and then post it to colorslive.com. I can't wait to get this one released! If you are a Patron, feel free to try the PC version out and let me know if you find any issues so we can get all bugs squashed before we submit it to Nintendo!

jaames

Sun, 4th December 2022 at 1:08pm

The issue with stuck painting comment / like / mention notifications should also be fixed now — that’s the one where the notifications couldn’t be dismissed by tapping them if the painting had been deleted

jaames

Sun, 20th November 2022 at 11:04pm

Hello! I think I've fixed the issue where notifications for comment mentions and new followers sometimes weren't sent out, but it's a very unpredictable (timing-dependent) bug, so we need some help to confirm that!

If you notice that you haven't received a notification for a comment mention, from a comment posted after you've read this, please let us know in #tech-support on colorslive.com/discord. Please try to include a screenshot of the exact comment you weren't notified about too. Thanks!

Jens

Sun, 13th November 2022 at 5:18pm

This feed has been quite neglected lately, but here's a sneak peek of a thing that's in the pipeline.

Jens

Mon, 23rd May 2022 at 5:03pm

I've been working on v1.12 for a while now. Lots of effort has gone into rewriting some parts of Colors Live to make room for new features. This isn't very exciting for end-users, but it's necessary to get in things like Special Layers, which is a very powerful feature that we'll use for a lot of things. We've also reworked the general look of our brush icons. This is the first time since the original Colors! prototype back in 2007 that we've updated the brush icons, which is pretty crazy. The big underlying changes will require additional time for testing, but I'll post some updates here and there in the coming weeks before v1.12 goes into submission.

jaames

Tue, 10th May 2022 at 1:15pm

Hello! Since April is over now, this is just a quick heads-up that the Spring Quest will be disappearing in a couple of days. Please make sure to copy any paintings that you'd like to keep into your local gallery as soon as possible!

In the future, we hope to add a way to retrieve your paintings from seasonal Quests once they're closed (and add more seasonal Quests in general!), but in the meantime you won't have access to your paintings until this happens.

Twarda

Tue, 22nd March 2022 at 5:09pm

Hey everyone!
We put a small surprise in the upcoming Colors Live update for you. And that surprise is... Spring Quest! Yup, during April you will be able to try out 10 new challenges!

Curious enough? Designing a brand new world for you to explore is a challenge itself 😉 So let me show you some sneak peeks from behind the scenes too! Like with everything creative, the beginnings can be humble. Ideas, flow, possible colour schemes and visual language get more and more finalized within each step.
The final effect? Well, you will have to see it yourself! And we hope you will enjoy it!

Jens

Mon, 7th March 2022 at 8:30am

v1.10 is in submission with Nintendo, and should hopefully be approved and released this week. The two big additions is a new brush list screen (which will be further updated future versions) along with a new flood fill tool!

jaames

Tue, 22nd February 2022 at 1:52pm

A few of you might have come across a bit of a nasty bug where viewing certain paintings (or sometimes entire artist profiles) causes the Colors Live app to crash. This can happen either on a local painting or on the gallery when an at symbol or hashtag are used in a painting/profile description without anything after them - the app tries to turn these into an artist mention or a tag link, but it's not able to.

We wanted to reassure everyone that this will be fixed in the next Colors Live update (version 1.10), and any affected paintings will be accessible again after updating. In the meantime, please try to avoid leaving unfinished mentions/tags in descriptions.

As a partial temporary fix for the online gallery, we've started automatically removing these broken mentions/tags from descriptions and comments. Proper mentions and tags shouldn't be affected, but you may notice that things like emoticons containing these symbols are formatted strangely. This measure will be removed after the next update rolls out. Thanks for your patience!

jaames

Wed, 16th February 2022 at 5:29pm

We've made it easier to block people in Colors Live on your Nintendo Switch! The new "manage blocklist" button in your account settings will let you view a list of artists that you have blocked, and you can add someone to this list by searching for their name.

Blocking someone will stop them from being able to comment on the paintings you've posted to the colorslive.com gallery. We're going to work on extending this so that you never see an artist you've blocked as you browse around the gallery, but that's a much bigger task, so it's not ready yet.

Also, for additional safety and spam prevention, we've blocked new accounts from being able to leave comments from the colorslive.com website. This limit will be removed as soon as you sign into that account from any version of the Colors app/game :)

Jens

Mon, 14th February 2022 at 1:54pm

We're currently working on improving brush selection which will allow us to have a bunch of more brushes without things getting too messy. The help with that, I've experimented with adding a second "row" of favorite brushes that you'll quickly be able to access either from the palette, but also directly while painting. It feels promising.

Jens

Mon, 31st January 2022 at 10:23am

Yay! We found it! After hours and hours of trying to reproduce the playback bug, @jaames and I finally narrowed it down to the select&move and undo. @Acchan managed to provide us with an simple example of the bug, and after narrowing it down further we now know the issue.

If you undo while having the selection tools open, you risk having the playback miss changes to scroll/zoom, changing layer, or color/brush changes. In the video above, you can see how the small scroll I do gets missed in the playback. I think this is the source of the absolute majority of the playback bugs. The fix for this will make it into v1.9 that we are submitting as soon as we've verified the fix! Thanks to all of you who contributed reports and lets hope it will be all but forgotten in a few months! 🥳🥳🥳

#build-status

#dev-log

Jens

Jens

Jens

Jens

jaames

jaames

Jens

Jens

jaames

Twarda

Jens

jaames

jaames

Jens

Jens