Chameleon: The Adventure
The Design of Space & Puzzles
Nylah DePass | Elena Lee Felix | Samantha Koire | Nate Lee | Michelle Park |Jin Woo Yu
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 individuality; the world loses most of its color as a result. You start to venture back up the tree, first learning how to blend in. But as you progress through the puzzles, you add new colors to your arsenal, improving your ability to navigate and bolstering your sense of self and accomplishment. By restoring the player chameleon’s confidence and individuality, represented by color, player chameleons realize that the point isn’t just to blend in but rather to have fun and stand out.
While the above was the original storyline for our game, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests making waves across our country, we’ve begun to see our game in a new light. In many ways, our game can represent something more. While our messaging is about a chameleon that learns to build its confidence and stand out, it really does also reflect required assimilation in order to climb to the top of the tree and make it safely to your family. And that even as you progress, you must dodge obstacles and learn hidden rules in order to advance forward and color yourself vibrant colors instead of those mundane. And yet you are still forced to fit in even once you are brightly colored and able to create your own shades. Our final level has a “free jump” zone where you can move freely regardless of your color. Where you are safe to explore.
Final Game
Chameleon: The Adventure is available on the web. Click the link below from your computer to play!
Development Process
Sketches:
We wanted upward movement to reflect the upward progress the chameleon makes on their journey to self-confidence. Additionally, we were inspired by this Ted Talk by Scott McCloud and wanted the camera to be a moving window into the chameleon’s life so as to make use of the vast space inside a computer that is not constrained by a game box or board. In this medium post, we discuss our preliminary concept and gameplay choices.
First Prototype: Movement & Color Changing Capabilities
Playtesters:
- Two of our classmates: 1 male, 1 female, ~22 years old
Changes to make:
- Lock the rotation of the player. Playtesters were able to break the game by falling in a manner where they rotate and fall on their side and are unable to move.
- Design the scene to resemble a tree/chameleon. Players found coloring fun but felt it didn’t serve a purpose. They thought color changing had much more meaning once we verbally shared the intended story. Additionally, since everything was some form of a rectangle, there weren’t any visual cues to each object’s functionality which caused frustration.
Keeps:
- Graphics that hint at keyboard functionality. Players quickly learned how to navigate, splat color, and shoot color.
- Obstacles to jump on and over. Players had the most fun changing colors in midair and jumping onto the platform and over the color changing cubes.
Second Prototype: Infinite Color Possibilities & Tree Design
Playtesters:
- Our team created subteams: Development (Sami, Nate, & Elena) and Art (Nylah, Jin Woo, & Michelle). For this playtest, the art team played and gave their feedback.
Changes:
- Add more of the narrative: a screen that shows the chameleon falling out of the tree and the color draining from the world, a player that’s actually a chameleon and not a cube. Players remarked that they wanted to feel more connected to the story
- Messaging when you need it: Instead of showing all the mechanics and how they correlate to the keyboard at the base of the tree, show the hints as you need them. Players felt like they were memorizing options and that there was information overload.
- Save infinite colors for a later part of the game: While the color changing cube was fun to allow the player to run free with color, it limited our ability to define which colors the player has access to at which points in the game.
Keeps:
- Players were able to quickly figure out how to jump up the branches of the tree, so we decided to stay with the vertical platformer where motion is controlled through the keyboard.
3rd Prototype: Graphics that Convey Narrative
Playtesters:
- Feedback from Scott Kim, who read our elevator pitch, saw the above functionality, and listened to our plans for the game’s puzzle mechanic.
Changes:
- Have the whole world visible and the puzzle embedded into the game as a core aspect. Don’t make hidden rooms out of the knots of the tree where the puzzles take place and unlock new colors/emotions (not pictured).
- Create the puzzle design. This was a giant creative brainstorm. It was simultaneously exciting to generate so many ideas and overwhelming to feel the game branching in so many directions. We determined the message we hoped to convey → what mechanics we wanted to integrate in our game → a puzzle design that would utilize the mechanics and reflect the theme → and finally a specific plan for each level. This method helped us refine our ideas into a concrete plan.
- Design a visual user interface for the color storing/changing capabilities of the chameleon in order to make our mechanics easier to understand and our puzzles more meaningful to solve.
Keeps:
- Title screen, chameleon falling at the beginning of the game, and the chameleon as a chameleon and not a cube. These aspects added to the cohesion of the game.
4th Prototype: Level Design and a Mechanic to Change Color
Playtesters:
- Feedback from Laura Hall, who read our updated elevator pitch, saw updated gameplay functionality, and looked at our level design plans in Figma.
- Our team of 6 students (2 male, 4 female, ~22 years old)
Changes:
- Decrease difficulty. We decided the game was way too hard since you would fall through a platform you were safely on if you were hit by a different drop color and thus changed to another color. To minimize this frustrating learning curve, we made it so you only fall through platforms if you land on them the incorrect color.
- Recolor the first segment of the tree to match the chameleon’s start color so the player starts off blending in and understands that that’s the goal.
- Messaging when you need it: Instead of showing an empty color picker from the start, only introduce it once the player has acquired their first color (landing successfully on a new colored platform) so that there isn’t unnecessary information on the screen confusing players.
- Introduce Hints: Tell players, without interrupting the gameplay, that they can select from colors they’ve discovered using the keypad.
- Navigate using arrow keys. Players had a hard time navigating using the AWD keys and changing colors using the number keys simultaneously.
Keeps:
- The overall design for the puzzle, a visual representation of your color palette, and a subtly presented narrative.
5th Prototype (sped up): Refined Graphics and Obstacles
Playtesters:
- 3 students from our class. One had played a previous iteration of our game.
Changes:
- Make platform colors match bark colors. Players were confused about which color they needed to match and expressed that the platforms felt disconnected from the tree.
- Make it easier to time droplets. Players were frustrated that it was difficult to determine where the droplets were coming from, so we changed the camera view to show more of the future instead of simply centering the chameleon and added clouds where the droplets spawn.
- “Decorate” checkpoints. It wasn’t clear that the checkpoints are checkpoints and that they really are safe zones for a reason, so we “decorated” them to look different from all the other platforms.
- Make Grey #1 and #2 more distinct. They were too hard to tell apart, especially in droplet form.
6th Prototype: Usability Improvements
Playtesters:
- 5 students from our class. None had previously played our game.
Changes:
- Discover color animation: It wasn’t very obvious that a new color you obtained appeared in the color picker. We added an animation to the chameleon and the color picker when the discovery appears to highlight it.
- Hints: Players really liked the visual flair of the hint that appears above the color picker but remarked that it was too small to be easily readable and disappeared too quickly. We increased its size and programmed it to stay on the screen until the player follows its advice and selects a color.
- Platform alignment & jump velocity: There were a couple platforms whose colliders were slightly misaligned, which allowed the chameleon to walk off the edge (as pictured above). Additionally there was one platform that was extremely difficult to get to, so we gave the chameleon a little extra jumping power.
Additions:
- Load level option: With 12 levels, 131 platforms, 9 primary colors, and 6 blended colors to discover and create, it takes a while to play this game in one go! This change makes it possible for people to play in stages. Additionally, it allows playtesters to focus on specific regions of the game since it still isn’t just right.
- Return to menu in-game option: Again, the game is long. It’s nice to be able to checkpoint your progress and return to the menu!
- Background music and sound effects: We didn’t have sound effects for color discovery, jumping, blending colors, getting hit by a color, etc before this iteration, and it really helped make the game more immersive. Players were excited to get more feedback than we were previously offering. Our background audio is now a song that evokes the emotions of our game as opposed to the bird chirping outdoor sounds that we were previously playing.
- Color blending: This is where the game really comes to life. After discovering all the colors in your palette, you can blend with special droplets to become new platform colors and progress up the tree. Solving this puzzle requires the player to rethink their relationship with the drops that fall on them.
- Return to family: There is a final screen where the chameleon is no longer one color but rather all the colors it has ever been and is able to land on any platform it desires. It finds its family on a branch and they reunite. Doing so loads our credits.
If you still haven’t played Chameleon: The Adventure, you really should! Play here.
