Chroma
Chroma is a game created for Sheridan Colleges’ “Design Week” challenge. In this week-long intensive, we are put into groups and have to develop games based on a prompt given by the professors and industry professionals who oversee our work and provide guidance. At the end of the week, our games are judged by the aforementioned industry professionals who rank their top 10 favorite games, which are given further feedback as a reward. Chroma was placed on this top 10 list.
The prompt for this instance of Design Week was to develop 3 games that all are based on the same sport. Our group decided on Dodgeball as our sport, and we split into three smaller subsections who would each develop their own variation. Chroma was my subsection’s version of this challenge.
The Design
For this challenge, I was the Game Designer and Programmer for our subsection. I had been brewing up a thought experiment of a visually deprecated game where players can only see specific aspects of the game and have to infer others. Similar to optical illusions that trick your brain into seeing things that aren’t explicitly there (Figure 2). For instance, could the player determine the trajectory of a ball in pong if they couldn’t see it?
With dodgeball being the challenge, I wanted to incorporate a few specific elements of the design, namely the team element and the hectic gameplay that dodgeball tends to devolve into.
With these aspects in mind, I decided to create a couch co-op party game where communication both visually and verbally is required to win. This is done by giving asymmetric roles to each team. In this case, the Paddles can hit the ball, but can’t see it, and the Pingers can see the ball, but can’t hit it. This visual deprivation is achieved through the use of customized 3D Glasses (Figure 4/5) that, when combined with the color choices in the game, lead to players with specific glasses being able or not being able to see elements of the game. Each team would have one player wearing each color of glasses.
The Pinger role allows for that player to put a small circle in play that is visible for the paddle player (Figure 6). These are meant to inform the Paddle player to see where the ball is and where it is going. These Pings slowly decrease in size when spawned, allowing the Paddle player to figure out where the ball is going. Throughout the game, the color of the screen will shift and the roles of the players would change on the spot. This means that the players are not relegated to playing the supportive role of the Pinger and this process breaks the inherently asymmetrical gameplay that it had.
Figure 6 : Example of the “Pings” the Pinger player could put down (The small blue circles)
Programs : Unity, Git, iTween
Figure 1 : Example of Dodgeball
Figure 2 : This is an optical illusion that tricks your mind into thinking there is a triangle in the image when there is none fully drawn.
Figure 4 : First example of the customized 3D glasses (Not actual image)
Figure 3 : Screenshot of the game with the visual filter colored so people with the blue glasses can’t see the ball.
Figure 5 : Second example of the customized 3D glasses (Not actual image)
What I Learned
Chroma was a fascinating project to work on for many reasons. The design by itself worked without having to tweak much in terms of balancing. Pong is a formula that has been done to death, so there wasn’t much to change.
What happened to be our major downfall was screen resolution and brightness. The glasses aren’t perfect and if the brightness of the screen was off-colored or different in some way, both players would be able to see the ball regardless of their glasses, which invalidated the entire purpose of the game. This game is also not intended for audiences who are color-blind or visually impaired in that way, which is something we decided would be fixed if this was a project we looked to continue on.
What I can say in the end is that this project was tremendously fun and demonstrated an interesting pipeline from a weird thought experiment to a fun version of the game.