Concept Document: The Colorful Life

Published in

Game Design Fundamentals

5 min readMay 11, 2020

Synopsis

Magic exists in the world — chameleons are able to express their emotion and protect themselves by changing their body color. In our game, we hope to harness that power to reflect how essential our mental wellbeing and memories are and how our experiences ‘color’ our view of the world. As a chameleon, a predator bird knocks you out of your home at the top of a tree where you lived happily with your family. When you fall to the ground, you hit your head and lose most of your memories and emotions; the world loses most of its color as a result. You start to venture back up the tree, making new friends and uncovering old memories as you navigate the world and regain your happiness. By painting your own world and learning how to find and throw color into it, player chameleons realize that the point isn’t just to blend in but rather to have fun, embrace their emotions, and stand out.

Theme: Emotion through Color

In this game, we want to use color as a primary indicator of story, setting, and character progression. Player chameleons will encounter color balls as they climb the tree, and each will correspond to a specific emotion that the chameleon is regaining — they’ll learn about it through one of their memories that was previously lost. Then they’ll be able to throw that color into the world. As color ‘piles’ up, the opacity will increase and become more opaque. This will allow colors to stack/overlay which represents the interconnectedness of our emotions and how they can coexist. Colors will also indicate a level of “karma” or good/bad will based on the actions the chameleon takes in game.

Tone

Mysterious: The player should be kept literally and figuratively in the dark until more clarity is reached about the story.
Curious: We want to foster an environment where the player wants to explore the different parts of the tree. We can do this by enhancing the mystery of the game.
Deep: The game should be light hearted and simple, but it should still have a depth to it that hits the player through the simplicity.

Setting

A massive multi-leveled tree. As the chameleon goes through the story, it faces different levels of the tree, which are each far-branching and their own mini-worlds.

Gameplay

A big part of our game was not to create a side scroller, but a bottom-up scroller. We felt like this mentally puts the player in a mindset where they have to use courage and strength to overcome obstacles and to bring clarity back to their world.

We wanted to create a simple game. Aside from regular movement (up, down, left, right, jump), we will have two ways of adding color to the environment: to throw a color via using their tongue, and to blast a splash of color around them. The color will become the portal for the player to do all actions, which can be done with a simple click of a button.

Preliminary sketches of color blasting mechanics

Key Challenges in Design, Tech and Art

A major challenge we will face is making the game aesthetically pleasing. Since the world is primarily in black and white, we will need to work to make this visually appealing to players as they slowly color in the world. We will need to especially think about how to make the environment colorable, especially if the player is given the freedom to color at will.

We will also need to tackle the dynamics of game actions — how the chameleon will shoot paint at the world, how it will traverse up the tree, and how it will interact with other creatures along the way. Finally, we intend to make our game in 2D, so we will need to figure out how to make the game feel like it is 3D (parallaxing?).

Another design challenge that we intend to take on in this game is making a very color-heavy game colorblind-friendly. We will need to consider different forms of accessibility adjustments that will make the game not only possible to play with different forms of color vision deficiency, but fun and beautiful to play with those differences in vision. We will look to the game Outer Worlds for inspiration and our colorblind teammate Nate for accessibility testing.