About Toon Tone — A Cartoon Color Memory Game for Animation Fans
Toon Tone is a free browser game that asks one simple question, five times in a row: what color is that, exactly? The "that" is always a part of a cartoon character — Pikachu's cheeks, Goku's hair, Spongebob's pants, the goggles on a Studio Ghibli pilot — and the player's job is to rebuild the color from memory using three HSB sliders. This page is the story behind the game.
Why a cartoon color memory game?
The idea started with a small frustration. Most "guess the color" games online either give you a hex code to identify (which doesn't connect to anything you actually remember) or show you a photograph (which has hundreds of subtly different pixels and no clean answer). Cartoons hit a sweet spot: every base color is deliberate, every character is recognizable, and the answer is unambiguous because it was drawn by an artist on purpose.
So Toon Tone was built around a single mechanic: name a cartoon part, hide its color, ask the player to recreate it from memory. Five rounds, score averaged, leaderboard.
The mission, in one line
Make a free, beautiful, fast color memory game that respects players' time, their privacy, and their love of animation.
"Free" means free, not freemium — no upsell tiers, no ads in the gameplay loop. "Fast" means the page loads in under two seconds on a phone, and a full game takes about three minutes. "Respects privacy" means no signup, no tracking pixels, no email capture before you can play. "Love of animation" means we curate the character pool by hand and refresh it regularly with new shows, films, and styles.
The tech behind Toon Tone
Toon Tone is a small, careful web app. Built with vanilla JavaScript and a Vite build, hosted on a custom toontone.app domain. The character images are hand-prepared so the target color is precise. Scoring runs entirely in the browser, so there's no round-trip latency between your guess and the result. The leaderboard syncs to Supabase for persistence — that's the only network hop in the whole game, and it happens after you submit, not before.
The HSB color model was chosen on purpose. Read more in Why HSB beats RGB for color guessing games.
The cartoon catalog
The character pool is curated, not crowd-sourced, and stretches across Western and Eastern animation history:
- Classic Western cartoons — Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, early Disney
- Modern Western series — Adventure Time, Rick and Morty, The Simpsons, Spongebob, Steven Universe
- Studio Ghibli and modern anime film — recognizable characters with distinctive palette choices
- Shonen and shojo classics — Dragon Ball, Naruto, Sailor Moon, One Piece
- Pokémon and other game-adjacent characters — palettes that reward fans of both anime and games
New characters are added in batches every few weeks. If a character you love is missing, send us a note — we keep a running list.
What Toon Tone is not
- Not affiliated with any studio. Toon Tone is an independent fan project. We are not connected to Disney, Toei, Studio Ghibli, Pokémon Co., Cartoon Network, or any rights holder. The character names appear only as targets for a guessing puzzle, in the same way a trivia game references show titles.
- Not a quiz. You aren't asked to remember names or facts — you're asked to remember a specific shade. Different muscle.
- Not a wiki. We don't catalog characters or stream content. We're just a small game.
- Not a SaaS. No subscription, no upgrade, no enterprise plan.
The team
Toon Tone is built by a tiny team of two — a designer who got tired of bad color tools, and an engineer who wanted a side project that didn't require running a backend. Most decisions are made over text in a few minutes, which is why the game ships fast and stays small.
How to get in touch
If you want to:
- Suggest a character for the catalog
- Report a bug or a wrong color
- Pitch a guest article for the blog
- Ask about embedding Toon Tone in a class or workshop
...just open the game and use the share/feedback link in the footer. We read everything that comes in, even if we can't always respond fast.
Where Toon Tone has been
The game first launched on a free Vercel subdomain as a weekend prototype. Player response surprised us, so we moved it to a custom domain so the game could grow up. The migration story is here: Toon Tone moved from Vercel.