Releasing Place Holder

Place Holder was made in two days in a game jam where the theme was “camouflage,” which we, as a team, struggled to come up with a game idea at first.

The thing we all had in our minds was that we should not be focusing on the physical meaning of camouflage but another. Then, we came up with an idea, which then resulted in Place Holder.

After the game jam, we wanted to work on the project for some more time and make it reach a state where it is both easy and interesting to play. In two weeks, we have finalized the project and released it.

The Idea

After passing a few ideas around in the group, we decided to implement the camouflage mechanic as a social or emotional one. 

In Place Holder, the protagonist is a robot who is trying to discover its true feelings; and, to do so, it must camouflage into others’ moods to both learn from the experience and avoid unwanted results.

Each gameplay is a different experience, there are a total of 15 different endings and more than hundreds of ways to reach them. Depending on the path you choose as the robot, your deductions differ, so do the endings and scenes throughout the game.

Mechanics

After the idea was constructed, we started thinking around a mechanic that will allow the player to observe the atmosphere and encountered entities, as well as the music, before making any decisions.

We decided to use a different music track for each mood to get the player into the atmosphere, and also added certain visual elements to give more appropriate feedback to the player.

Considering the release version of the Place Holder, there are a total of 5 different music tracks, each corresponding to a mood that the robot can camouflage to. To make things a little bit easier for the player, we later added a mood scale on top of the screen for some visual feedback as well.

Other than those, we thought that creating character portraits and reflecting encounters’ emotions in those portraits could also improve the quality of the visual feedback the player gets. Regarding this thought, we added certain emotion identifiers to portraits for further feedback.

After handling all these, the game got much easier and more fun to play compared to the version we have completed in the game jam in the first place, in just 48 hours.

What's Next?

There may be updates following the release of Place Holder to fix certain bugs or polish some aspects of the game, maybe even adding new dialogues and extending the possibilities; but, for now, it can be said that the game has reached its final state. 

As the authors, we all hope that you’ll enjoy Place Holder!

Please do not hesitate to share your thoughts about the game, every inch of feedback is highly appreciated!