Palette
‘ A mystery, a ghost, and … kids! ‘
— A game about children inner world
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Genre
3D Exploration Narrative Puzzle Game
Team Size
2 & Contributors
Duration
8 months
State
Demo
Contributions
System Design
Narrative Design
Art (Art Direction, Environment Art, UI)
Level Design
Project Management
Keywords
Children Mental Health
Serious Game
Cute & Creepy
Children Protagonists
Character Switching
Palette is a 3D exploration narrative puzzle game set in a kindergarten. You will play as 2 kindergarteners, trapped in a 1-hour time loop by a ghost, helping him to figure out who is the victim of an evil conspiracy, in order to save them before the tragedy happens. Talk with NPCs, eavesdrop conversations, search for objects…… Explore the mysterious kindergarten full of secrets! It’s a game themed on children mental health and education.
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Table of Contents
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System Design
1. Main Game Loop
2. Why Make the Game?
For the education of preschool children, parents and teachers often focus on the maintenance of physical health and the cultivation of intellectual development, while sometimes ignoring the importance of mental health. However, from the perspective of individual life-long development, changes in the psychological level of preschool children will have both explicit and implicit long-term effects.
The production of Palette is intended to bring awareness to the mental health education of preschool children, to promote the establishment of harmonious parent-child and teacher-student relationships, and to resist harmful mental health environments for children.
3. What Are the Challenges?
- Evoke compassion for children characters with psychological sub-health states, through creation of an emotional playing experience
- Depict multiple groups of parent-child relationships and child-to-child relationships to reflect various problematic mental health environments for preschool children.
- Arouse attention to serious topics through pressure-free game atmosphere
4. Design Solutions
Narrative-focused Game Mechanics
All game mechanics are designed to serve the goal of better delivering stories about children mental health, and allowing players to better empathize with children characters.
Fragmented and Parallel Group-Image Narrative
Players are expected to experience the story from the perspective of an observer. The game is not intended to instill or teach the player the correct view of children’s mental health. The goal is to raise awareness on the importance of creating positive nurturing environments, by showing the existing sub-healthy parent-child relationships in a relatively objective way.
Characters with Different Growing Environments
To show players that different kinds of nurturing environments shape children’s behaviors, way of thinking, mental states, in totally different ways, starting from a young age. And the results not only influence one kid, but every single kid is like a little center of radiation. Their mental conditions gradually influence other kids through social dynamics.
Light-hearted Art Style with Hint of Seriousness
In order to create a more relaxed atmosphere, the dominant colors of the game are warm tones (pink, orange). I also adopt a more flattened and color-blocked art style for environment textures to reduce the sense of burden. Meanwhile, the black-and-white design of characters and interactable objects hints at the serious core of the game.
5. Mechanics & Design Intentions
Interactions
We have 5 kinds of interactions in the game. To gather clues, players can: 1) Search and observe objects; 2) Talk with NPCs; 3) Eavesdrop on conversations; 4) Move objects; 5) When a kid is mad at you, you can search and give them gifts. These are some of the main ways children interact with the real world. eg. The only way children can learn about the communications between adults is to eavesdrop.
Main clues & Character clues
Main clues are main storyline clues about mysteries that happen in Palette kindergarten. Game is finished after players collect all of the main clues. Players can check collected main clues and their progress in the ‘Drawing book’ section of UI interface.
Character clues are information about game characters. They also serve as leads for how & where to find main clues. The collected character clues are saved in the ‘Character Profile’ section of the game.
Deduction & Clue Searching
Most of the mainline clues are hidden in somewhat hard-to-find locations. The primary design reason is as follows: Because Palette is a narrative-centric game, there is inevitably a large amount of text in the game. In order to create the necessity to read and understand the text, each clue contains a hint to the location of the next Main Clue (or to a Character Clue that hints at the next Main Clue).
In order to gather the Main Clues, players can choose to purely use their search ability to conduct a rigorous search of the scene, and enjoy the game in the way of a treasure hunt. However, this method is time-consuming and labor-intensive, thus not ideal in a game with a time limit as Palette; Or instead, players can choose to read the clue texts carefully, extract the leads to obtain the Main Clues, and play the game in the way of a deduction game. In this way, players can digest the story to the greatest extent.
Character Switching
Players can switch between 2 protagonists – Leo & Plum. They get access to their exclusive clues based on their personalities. Players have to deduce the correct protagonist to use in order to obtain each clue. The 2 characters react to the same clue in different ways. (eg. trigger different conversation choices in a conversation)
Conversation Options & Silent Treatment
During conversations with child characters, players encounter narrative choices. By choosing the right options based on character features, players can advance the conversation; otherwise a ‘silent treatment’ gets triggered.
‘Silent Treatment’: After choosing the ‘wrong’ conversation choice, the child character players talk to become angry and refuse further conversation. In order to comfort them and restore the conversation, players need to find suitable gifts for them in the level.