Save the Color

Game Design - Level Design

Project Overview

Save The Color is a 3D puzzle game created for the 10th edition of UNIJAM. The theme of the Game Jam was "Tout se transforme" (a reference to Lavoisier). This is why the very principle of our game is to be able to transform the levels as you wish to complete them.

My Contributions

We were a team of 8: 1 3D artist, 5 developers, 1 community manager and 2 game designers (including me). She and I took care of the game design and level design. We also created certain assets, such as the portal.

First, we got together with our team on Friday evening to draw up the project and a playable scope. We had until Sunday 2pm to deliver a playable game. The general idea was to go for a 3D game, as it was highly visual and meant we couldn't dwell forever on 2D graphics. We then thought about a main mechanic that respected the "everything transforms" theme, and decided to have the player start from point A and go to point B. And to do this, he would have to transform his environment
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That's how we came up with the primary color mechanism. On the development side, it allowed us to keep things simple by simplifying them to plain colors, and on the gameplay side, the player could easily associate a color with a game mechanic. Our aim was to finish the game by Saturday night. On one hand, we knew it wasn't going to be perfect, because like any project, there are bound to be complications. On the other hand, if we reached our time target, we could concentrate on polishing the game and maximizing Game Feel, as well as a few small details like character speed, the power of specific colors, etc...

Arrived on Saturday morning, a significant part of our basic mechanics was ready. On my end, the main idea for a tutorial and two levels was prepared :
A tutorial that would showcase the mechanics of each color and compel the player to use each one of them.
A deconstructed, chaotic world with fragments that would prompt the player to think and strategize as they progress, figuring out how to reach the end.
A slightly more orderly world that would give the player the opportunity to plan their route in advance, and if they can't succeed, modify a logical world to complete it.

During the Game Jam, I made it a point to have check-ins approximately every 2/3 hours to see where everyone was at. I didn't know anyone in my team, so I assumed that if someone was stuck, they wouldn't spontaneously ask me for help or suggest modifying the ideas I had proposed. Additionally, I was unfamiliar with the extent of each person's skills, so before each new objective, I made sure that at least one person could confirm they knew how to proceed or at least where to start.

By Sunday, we were able to polish our game until the very last second. We then proceeded to the live presentation on YouTube and in front of the Game Jam audience (you can find the video just below, in french, I'm the man with a white luffy sweat). Out of the two available awards, our game received the Jury Prize. For a first Game Jam, I was really proud of myself and of what my team had proposed. Moreover, what particularly pleased us was that the same jury (some of the organizers of the Game Jam) had doubts about our ability to complete our game project that we pitched to them (not in a bad way, of course, they just wanted to ensure that we didn't dive into an unfeasible project for us). So, we were able to demonstrate our capabilities and that the confidence we had in our project paid off.

You can find the game at the link right below :

Save the Color