Mind Palace is a game made for 2021 College Game Jam. The game was completed in a week by a five-person group using Unity and the theme of the game jam is "Connection". We made this game during COVID quarantine time, and the idea we mainly expressed was about the connection between a psychotherapist and her patient in a remote condition. The player will be acting as the psychiatrist asking questions to her patient, and we used a special split-screen mechanism to show both the psychiatrist's action of exploring the patient's mind and their actual remote chat.
This game won 1st place in creativity and mood and ranked 8th overall in all 85 games attending the 2021 College Game Jam. In this project, I was mainly responsible for Game Mechanic Design and Art Making including UI, character design, and animation.
Game Mechanic
In this game, we abstract the concept of psychological counseling and turn it into a concept of walking inside a maze. We focused on the point of view of the psychiatrist, and counseling is like walking inside the mind of a patient and trying to find a way to see a deeper aspect.
We used split-screen as our main method to express this idea. On the right side of the screen is the chat between our main character and her patient, and on the left side is her exploring a maze. Every question in the chat corresponds to a forked road in the maze, and different choices of words will lead the character to a different direction in the maze.
We hope to use this mechanic to emphasize the theme connection, in which there are many different aspects we intend to incorporate. The first aspect of connection is to express the process of how people connect with each other, from the surface to a deeper ground, like walking in a maze, and within the process, it is necessary to make mistakes and go back and forth until you find the right way. The second aspect of connection is that we wish to connect our mechanic with our narrative and create a game that can tell the story just with the mechanic itself.
An Early Game Mechanic Exploration and the Actual Game
Playthrough video of the First maze of Mind Palace
Art Making
For the overall art style of this game, I designed it as a hand-drawn sketch-like style to create a warm and touching feeling. Since the game is more focused on narrative and emotional expression, a more intimate style of art can help trigger players' emotions. The main character's design is in a more neutral way because we want the player to have more empathy while playing, which is another way of creating resonance and building up the player's emotion.
Main Character Walking Cycle Animation