NOV 23, 2024
ROOM: Designing Emotional Progression Through Mechanics and Aesthetics
When Yuan and I discovered the Mental Health Game Dev Champions (MHGDC) Jam, we immediately knew we wanted to take part. Both of us care deeply about mental health, but for Yuan, this project was especially personal. They had been dealing with depression and anxiety for a long time, and this felt like the right opportunity to express their story—if they chose to.
At first, I wasn’t sure what they had in mind. But when Yuan said they wanted to make a game about their father—and that they weren’t afraid to speak about it through this medium—I agreed without hesitation. I’ve always admired their courage in sharing something so deeply painful and personal. From that moment on, ROOM became a narrative led by their voice and art—one I supported through game design and programming.
THE STRUCTURE & NARRATIVE DESIGN
ROOM is divided into two main parts: a story-driven puzzle section and a 2D top-down action escape sequence.
In Part I, players uncover the roots of the protagonist’s mental health struggles by solving puzzles within the same apartment room, revisited across three stages of life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Although the room’s layout remains constant, its emotional atmosphere shifts, reflecting how the protagonist has been psychologically trapped in this space for years. Clues embedded in the environment and puzzles gradually reveal the emotional trauma tied to each life stage.
Part II takes a darker, more surreal turn. The apartment transforms into a distorted, abstract space, representing the breakdown of reality under the pressure of untreated mental illness. Players must find a way to escape this illusion. As they explore, the protagonist’s mental state deteriorates, slowing movement and altering visuals. Pills offer temporary stabilization, mirroring real-life coping mechanisms—but their effects are brief.
ROOM is designed to help players not only understand what mental illness feels like, but to empathize with it, encouraging them to confront overwhelming emotions rather than run from them.
PUZZLE DESIGN (PART I)
In this part of the development, Yuan was primarily responsible for puzzle design, while I focused on testing and iteration. Throughout the iteration process, we evaluated each puzzle using the following criteria:
1. Puzzle Logic & Readability
Does the puzzle have a clear and logical solution?
Are visual elements intuitive and easy to interpret?
Can players quickly recognize the purpose of each component?
Do the structures guide players naturally toward the intended solution?
2. Difficulty Curve
Do the three main stages show a progressively increasing level of difficulty?
Within each stage, do puzzles escalate from simple to complex?
Does the difficulty balance accommodate both beginners and experienced players?
3. Creativity & Variety
Are any puzzles repetitive or lacking originality?
Does each puzzle introduce a new mechanic or variation to keep the gameplay fresh?
4. Narrative Integration
Do the puzzles convey emotional or narrative context?
Are they thematically aligned with the protagonist’s life stage and mental state?
Iteration Examples
1. Photo Frame Puzzle Iteration
This puzzle was designed around arranging visual elements to reveal hidden numbers behind family members.
Initial Issue: Early designs were overly complex and not visually clear, making it hard for players to grasp the logic.
Iteration Improvements: We simplified the visuals into a combination of “dots and lines,” which appear as the characters’ mouths. We also adjusted the colors to distinguish these features from the background and enhance clarity.
Narrative Enhancement: The dots and lines are subtly interpreted as the characters’ mouths, but none of them form a smile. This creates a quiet but powerful metaphor of emotional silence and distance, reinforcing the sense of an unhappy family. This strengthens the puzzle’s emotional resonance without disrupting the player’s focus.
2. Diary Puzzle Iteration
This puzzle required players to analyze a chat log and reconstruct the timeline by identifying what happened and when.
Initial Issue: The original version required players to input both a specific timestamp and an event icon. However, many of the times were only implied rather than stated outright, which often led to confusion and misinterpretation.
Iteration Improvements: We streamlined the mechanics so players only needed to assign the correct event icon to pre-defined time slots in the UI. This allowed them to concentrate on interpreting the story, rather than second-guessing unclear timing details.
Visual Refinement: The first set of icons representing events was too abstract, making them difficult to interpret. We redesigned them using clearer, more concrete visuals with strong symbolic meaning, significantly improving readability and helping players more intuitively associate each icon with its related event.
LEVEL DESIGN (PART II)
Part II is designed not just as a gameplay segment but as a mechanical metaphor for psychological collapse. I handled level construction and core mechanics, while Yuan provided narrative feedback to ensure thematic consistency. We focused on the following design principles:
1. Clarity of Mechanics and Objectives
Are the rules of the level easy to understand?
Are new mechanics or controls clearly introduced at the beginning of the level?
Can players intuitively grasp the objective of the level?
Are in-scene objects and their functions easily understandable?
2. Balancing Difficulty
Can most players complete the level with fewer than three deaths? (To preserve narrative flow and avoid disrupting immersion with repeated failure)
Can most players find the exit without external hints? (To support a linear, story-focused experience, the level is built as a “clear labyrinth”—structured and intentional, but not confusing like a maze)
3. Emotional Empathy Through Mechanics
Do the core mechanics evoke a sense of anxiety that mirrors the protagonist’s mental state? (e.g., worsening movement conditions and the looming threat of the father’s shadow)
Do save points provide players with a sense of temporary safety, mirroring the protagonist’s coping mechanisms? (Each one tied to a comforting object or memory, such as a pet or family moment)
4. Environmental Storytelling
Can players connect the escape sequence back to the puzzle section? (Since the two parts have drastically different gameplay and visual styles, it was important to create continuity. The starting room in the escape sequence is the same space where the puzzle section took place.)
Can the layout and design of the environment communicate the protagonist’s emotional relationship with that space?
Iteration Examples
1. Start Room Rework
After the puzzle section ends, a transition cutscene brings the player into the escape sequence, now seen from a top-down perspective, beginning in the protagonist’s room.
Initial Issue: The original room was too large in scale, making it hard for players to recognize it as the same space from the earlier puzzles. This created a narrative disconnect.
Iteration Improvements: We significantly reduced the room’s size and recreated the layout and furniture placement to match the puzzle version closely. This helped players instantly recognize the room and reinforced a continuous emotional journey.
2. Narrative Enhancement of Save Points
Save points are distributed across the level as opportunities for the player to recover
Initial Issue: Save points were designed as comforting objects from the protagonist’s life, but placing them in the level without context left players unsure of their significance.
Iteration Improvements: We added short monologue lines that play when the player first approaches each save point. These lines reveal the protagonist’s emotional connection to the object, helping players understand its meaning and empathize with the protagonist’s fragile sense of safety.
GAME AESTHETICS ESTABLISH THE ATMOSPHERE
In ROOM, we aimed to establish emotional resonance through atmosphere—helping players intuitively understand the protagonist’s psychological state and feelings. While ensuring the gameplay remained engaging, we wanted to maximize the narrative impact of both visual and audio elements.
ART
Visual Style
The game is split into two parts, each with a distinct aesthetic direction:
Part I (Puzzle Section) adopts a detailed, expressive hand-drawn style. This approach enhances the visual clarity of puzzle components and reinforces narrative immersion through subtle environmental details.
Part II (Escape Section) shifts to a retro, abstract pixel-art style—deliberately dreamlike and nostalgic. This change reflects the protagonist’s distorted perception of reality and underscores the sense of dissociation and mental breakdown.
Color Tone
Color tone was a central tool in expressing psychological progression and emotional tone shifts.
1. Puzzle Section:
Childhood: Warm, comforting colors symbolize the fleeting happiness of early life.
Adolescence: Cold, desaturated blues and grays suggest growing emotional distance and melancholy.
Adulthood: stark black and white, with small amounts of red—representing the protagonist’s full descent into mental illness and emotional numbness.
2. Escape Section (Top-down Pixel Art):
Most of the environment is rendered in cold, desaturated hues to evoke discomfort and alienation.
In contrast, save points are surrounded by soft, inviting warm light—often linked to comforting elements from the protagonist’s life, such as his pet crow or his mother cooking. These warm lights aren’t just gameplay cues; they act as emotional anchors, allowing players to feel what the protagonist feels: temporary relief and a fragile sense of safety.
3. Final Room (Easter Egg Ending):
The final room mirrors the starting room’s layout but is now bathed in warm light, symbolizing healing.
As the protagonist walks to the painting in the center and says, "I can finally paint it all out", it marks a moment of emotional closure. They have accepted the pain and accepted themselves.
The shift in lighting and palette serves as a visual metaphor for this transformation—and gives players an intuitive sense of emotional release.
MUSIC & SOUND EFFECT
In designing the soundscape for ROOM, our goal was to create audio that not only supported the gameplay but also deepened the player's emotional connection to the protagonist’s inner world. Our sound design approach focused on these core principles:
Background Music (BGM)
Each level’s background music is selected to reflect the protagonist’s psychological and emotional state at that stage of life. The BGM is meant to act as a subtle emotional mirror—conveying warmth in childhood, melancholy in adolescence, and numbness or tension in adulthood and breakdown. Music plays a key role in building atmosphere and reinforcing narrative tone without explicit exposition.
Interaction Sound Effects (SFX)
Tactile Realism: Interactive sound effects are designed to feel grounded and lifelike, helping players sense the texture and weight of objects as they interact with the environment.
Mechanical Feedback: SFX provides clear feedback for in-game actions. They inform the player when an attempt is correct or incorrect, or when a situation is safe or dangerous—allowing players to understand systems intuitively through sound alone.
Emotional Cues: Sound effects also respond to the protagonist’s mental state. At key moments, subtle shifts in tone or added distortion help reflect internal changes such as anxiety spikes, fear, or emotional collapse. These cues aim to create a shared emotional rhythm between player and character.
By combining narrative-aware music and emotionally responsive sound design, ROOM seeks to offer an experience that players don’t just play—but feel—through every note, silence, and sound interaction.
FINAL THOUGHTS
AN EXPERIMENTAL EXPERIENCE, NOT A CONVENTIONAL ONE
From the beginning, we approached it as an emotional experiment—an attempt to let players step into the psychological and emotional reality of our protagonist. Even though ROOM’s structure isn’t traditional (with two gameplay styles and two distinct art directions), we believed that this contrast was the most honest way to reflect the character’s fractured inner world.
THE FEEDBACK FROM THE AUDIENCE
We’re incredibly grateful for the feedback we received. Some players told us the game resonated with their own lived experiences. Others—who hadn't personally gone through similar struggles—still reported feeling the anxiety and emotional weight we set out to convey. That means a lot to us.
We’d also like to thank the players who finished ROOM all the way through, and especially those who helped us test the game. Your bug reports, feedback, and emotional reactions helped us iterate quickly and make the game more stable, clear, and affecting.
A GAME THAT’S ALSO A CONVERSATION
More than anything, ROOM is a conversation about mental health, trauma, memory, and healing. It’s less a traditional game and more a shared emotional space between creators and players. For both of us, this was our first time focusing so fully on story and emotional experience, especially around such a heavy topic. But we found it deeply meaningful.
We created ROOM not only as a form of expression, but as a small gesture of support. To anyone carrying pain from the past, we want to say: you’re not alone. We hope this game helps you face those memories with honesty, courage, and compassion.