Colormari

Game Design

Tools - Java + IntelliJ, Photoshop + Adobe Illustrator

January 2018 - May 2018

Intro Game Design Course / Team Project

Overview

Players control Colormari as he attempts to evade Kingfin and his goons using Colormari’s ability to camouflage.

Kingfin has vowed to capture and consume Colormari and inherit his abilities in order to fuel his life of crime and garner more power in the undersea society. Aided by combat prowess acquired from his time at the undersea Ninja Academy, Colormari battles Kingfin’s goons and traverses the aquatic terrain to defeat the evil shark once and for all.

Players must focus on enemy type and positioning while strategizing when and where to employ Colormari’s camouflage ability.

Methods

Paper Prototyping, Design Ideation, User Testing

Team

David Arcia, Katherine Armour, Melissa Avila, Jonathan Oliveira, Brandon Cohen, Samuel Williams

Role

I served as a designer in this team. Some of my responsibilities included designing assets for characters and in game objects, as well as level design.

PROJECT CONTEXT

Game Design & User Experience

This was a semester-long team project for an Intro to Game Design course. My team and I were tasked with designing a game with the focus on using user feedback at each stage to prepare for the next iteration.

At each phase of the development process (prototype, alpha & beta release) peer review sessions were held. These were aimed at emphasizing gameplay issues, bugs, user experience, and the overall quality of the game.

The rubric of this project did not specify any genre of game and allowed for various platforms. As a result, we came up with the concept for Colormari: a bullet-hell top-down game where players must fight through an onset of enemy waves to advance through each level.

1. Design Ideation

Brainstorming

During this stage of development we brainstormed the initial ideas for the game. Individually, group members came up with 2-3 game concept ideas.

Concepts were derived using the following question sheet:

What dream are you satisfying?

I want to be a badass-futuristic gunfighter escape a high-tech facility
What is your setting?
What is your perspective?
What are the player’s primary and secondary goals?
What are the player’s actions?

Thereafter, a group session was organized to discuss these concepts. Ultimately many of these initial concepts share similarities in aspects of genre and gameplay. Using those overlapping elements, we came up with the initial concept of the game:

The players control Colormari as he attempts to evade Kingfin and his goons using Colormari’s ability to camouflage. Players must focus on enemy type and positioning while strategizing when and where to employ Colormari’s camouflage ability.

Paper Prototype

After arriving at our game concept we created a paper prototype to flush out what mechanics we wanted for the game. In addition, we would also garner feedback from our classmates during the paper prototype session during class.

Colormari Paper Prototype Rules

Materials:

Gameboard and resources.
Player Token : one side red & one side blue.
Bullet cutout- 25 red, 25 blue, and 10 yellow bullets.

Rules

The main playing board has 3 lanes. The bottom row of the main playing area is the “Player Zone,” where Colormari can move around. To start the game, place Colormari in the center cell of the “Player Zone.” Place the 2 resource counters on the top square of the resource bars. The game consists of rounds. Each round, Colormari must avoid the oncoming bullets. The first round, the player can declare an action.

Actions

The player can move Colormari to any adjacent cell in the player area. Additionally, the player draws the top 3 cards of the “Bullet Deck” and places them on the main playing board in the row labelled with the corresponding difficulty. If at anytime, the placed row consists of 3 yellow bullets, the player may shuffle them back into the deck and redraw.

Once the first round is over, each subsequent round plays out in this order:

Resolve the player’s action. Change Colormari’s color by flipping him over.
Move each row of bullets down one row. If bullets would be moved from the “Player Zone,” discard them.
Resolve collisions. If there are any bullets in the “Player Zone,” check to see if Colormari is “safe.” Colormari is “safe” if he is touching only a bullet of his current color. If Colormari is not “safe,” the player loses and the game ends.

Place the next row of bullets (as explained in turn 1)
Change the resource bars. Remove a resource token from Colormari’s current color. If the player decided to move two squares, remove 2 resources from the opposite color. Add a resource token to the other color if it is not already full. If Colormari’s current color has no resource tokens, the next player action must include a “color change” action.

Play continues until either the player loses or all bullets from the deck have been discarded.

2.Game Concept

Vision

Following the feedback we received from our classmates and teaching staff we were able to further refine the concept of the game. This included improving the mechanics and playability of the game, as well as coming up with a story behind the concept.

Colormari, a squid, possesses camouflage that allows him to avoid red or blue attacks.

Fear consumes the inhabitants of Atlantfish as Kingfin, the undersea gangster, and his goons have managed to acquire alarming power within the kingdom. Having heard about his amazing abilities, the creatures of Atlantfish sought the help of Colormari. All their fates become intertwined when Colormari accepts the mission to vanquish Kingfin while Kingfin vows to consume Colormari, acquire his abilities, and declare himself ruler. Colormari must fight through waves of Kingfin’s goons with nothing but his kunai, his camouflage, and his determination to bring peace back to Atlanfish.

Screen Shot 2018-02-12 at 11.58.01 PM.png

Objective

Players’ primary objective to protect and guide Colormari as he fights his way through an onslaught of enemies with the goal of ultimately reaching and vanquishing Kingfin.

Essentially, the primary goal of the players is to survive through waves of enemies and reach Kingfin, the final boss. Although enemies can be defeated by successfully hitting them with well placed shots, enemies can also be defeated by simply avoiding them until they traverse to the bottom or sides of the screen. However, keeping more enemies on screen means keeping more perils on the screen.

The idea of survivability perfectly synchronizes with the Core Vision and Design Philosophies of Colormari. The goal of surviving allows players to be constantly making decisions. Managing on screen enemies allows the players to get closer to the goal or farther away with each decision made. This not only keeps players thinking, but it also keeps players moving quickly and efficiently.

Actions

Challenges

Dodging Enemies and Projectiles

An obvious peril in a bullet-hell game is that players are bombarded with enemy projectiles from all directions. Avoiding these obstacles becomes challenging as players must not only dodge attacks but also kill enemies to prevent them from becoming troublesome with more enemies on-screen. Players might choose to camouflage through a bullet rather than actively dodge it. This choice creates a player dilemma and might even potentially allow for more replayability in the game.

Deciding Color

Deciding the color of Colormari is a major challenge for players, since this influences other aspects of the game such as dodging and taking damage from an enemy. Deciding color hinders the players’ ability to focus on avoiding enemy attacks, since the players must decide colors to avoid attacks of a specific color. This can only be successfully done if the players are the same color as enemy projectiles. Quick color changes may be difficult for novices to master but once a player becomes proficient at deciding which color to use, more focus may be diverted towards avoiding harmful bullets of the opposite color.

Design Goals

Exhilarating - The rapidly-paced and quick decision-making aspects of the game will make players’ hearts pump and palms sweat as they survive through stages of fast-moving enemies and seemingly endless bullets.
Tactical - Players will have to strategically manage their color resources and health as they maneuver across the screen to avoid and attack enemies.
Empowering - Colormari works alone against an army that becomes increasingly dead-set on destroying him, but perseveres regardless. Camouflaging Colormari from enemies will cause the players to feel stealthy and cunning, while destroying enemies in a hail of kunai will cause the players to powerful and skillful.
Deceivingly Silly - Underneat their silly and cute personas, enemies are treacherously difficult to avoid and kill. Players will feel betrayed by these endearing enemies who mercilessly destroy and defeat them.

Architecture Specification

During this stage of the game development we began to plan out the architecture of the game particularly for the programmers, and the model they will follow for building the game. Myself and the other designer also started to create assets for the game.

3.Prototypes

Gameplay prototype

This first prototype of Colormari introduced the basic building block of the game. The focus here was more on the mechanics and less on the graphical elements of the game.

Enemies come in different colors.
Colormari has the ability to switch colors.
If the enemy projectile is the same color as Colormari, the attack will miss.
If the enemy projectile is the opposite color of colormari, he will take damage.
Colormari can also shot his own projectiles:
- If the enemy is the opposite color as Colormari’s projectile it will take damage
- If the enemy is the same color as Colormari’s projectile it will miss

On the design side, the primary focus was producing initial mock-ups for the primary characters as well the the gameplay environment. We developed a main character and two enemy characters assets, and a rough background.

Technical Prototype

This prototype continued to add to the mechanics of the game, in particular, how the enemies behaved during a level progression.

This included an enemy waves progression where the player must dodge an onset of enemy projectile as they advance down the screen.

Not much changed design-wise for this prototype. As the programmers were creating the building block for the game, the lead designer and I continued work on those visual elements.

Alpha Release

Many improvements were made to gameplay during this stage of development. Hitboxes and UI design were tweaked to greatly improve the playability of the game. My team and I started to integrate our level editor with the game. We used the Tiled map editor software as a level editor.

Designers worked primarily on additional character animations, enemies, backgrounds, and HUD elements. The resource and health bars were mostly finalized.

Firing Patterns

This release of our game introduced various aspects of gameplay. We started to implement enemy projectile pattern; some enemies will shot projection in a linear or spiral fashion.

Resource Management

Color change is “timed.” Once the resource bar. Staying too long on a color drains that color’s resources.

Beta Release

During this stage of development, our game was complete for the most part. The rubric for this stage called for three levels of the game (easy, medium, and difficult).

Another major change is the character and enemy assets. As the character designer, I worked on refining and animating character movement within the game. In previous iterations of the game, characters were not animated but also were framed by black lines that surrounded them. These were removed in this prototype to create a more refined look to the character assets