-Overview-
Development Time: Jan 2022 - Feb 2023
Development Tools: Unity, Maya, Photoshop, Audacity
Genre: Typing, Horror
-Game Intent-
Of My Own Design is a short psychological-horror experience that places you in an isolated room with nothing but scrawls of letters adorning the walls. The gameplay consists of unscrambling words from letters plastered around a room, with the gameplay itself being a visualization of the deteriorating mind of a person suffering from suicidal thought. The horror is delivered through both the audial and visual environment, with both aspects reflecting the fractured mind of the player-character delving further into darkness and reinforcing invasive suicidal thoughts. The reasoning for the game's disturbing themes is to advocate for awareness about mental health and openly seeking help.
-Design Process-
Of My Own Design was a passion project turned reality that began with a simple concept: to make a game that promoted awareness for mental health, an issue I feel strongly about. I wanted the experience to differentiate itself from other short game projects centered around the same subject, but I knew I also had to directly and brutally demonstrate the effects of declining mental health in order to make the game effective in its goal. Because of both these facets, I decided to create a psychological horror experience that used typing as its primary mechanic.
The metaphorical idea behind this concept was to visualize the inside of a mind suffering from suicidal thought, with the gameplay representing the deterioration of the player-character's mental health. The mind itself would be represented by a dingy room, with the invasive thoughts being represented through letters plastered on the walls. The gameplay loop would then consist of the player looking around the room for letters that were visually represented differently (colored white), and use these letters to form a word, with new letters appearing if the player correctly guesses the word.
Letters represented in white on one wall of the room
I knew that centering the game experience around mental health awareness would be a fine line to tread. To be too upfront about the game's message would make it come across as preachy, but to misrepresent depression would portray the experience as ignorant. As such, I wanted to make the experience relatively up to player interpretation, with the ending of the game reinforcing the message.
This fine line was also a factor I had to consider carefully when concepting what words that each game loop formed, which would serve as the primary basis for the gameplay. On one hand, the words themselves had to mean something; they could not be randomly selected without reason, else they fail to help convey the portrayal of a deteriorating mind. On another hand, they had to narratively make sense when viewed in a linear form, as players would be unscrambling them one after another. But both these factors had to be achieved through one word at a time alone; I had to convey a lot in very little.
The solution to these factors was to use the time-tested format of the Five Stages of Grief as a guideline for what each word would be, with the idea being that there would be twenty words overall that were given in sets of four at a time, with small sequences in between each loop. Each of these sets would pertain to the linear stages of Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. However, because the point of the experience was to portray the negative effects of declining mental health, I put a dark twist on this format wherein each stage would descend the player further into depression, until the player-character reached the end, where it would be implied they commit suicide.
The final loop, where the phrase "DO IT" alongside a noose implies that the player-character commits suicide
In contrast to the deterioration of the player-character's mind, I wanted to demonstrate that this deterioration was not something the player-character wanted, presenting the intrusive nature of their depressive thoughts. To this end, I used the four sequences in between word sets as a narrative device that worked against the deterioration, presenting the player-character's desire to be freed from these thoughts.
Conversely, these sequences played into the psychological horror aspect of the experience, bringing forth this dual-purpose of the sequences to both reinforce the disturbing nature of the experience in a gameplay sense and narratively object to it. Overall, this design aided both in creating an atmosphere that made the experience unsettling to play, and conveyed a large part of the narrative that helped, in turn, to convey the overall message.
Third sequence in-between word sets where the single door of the room opens, demonstrating the player-character's desire to leave this place
Developing Of My Own Design taught me a lot about how to naturally and environmentally convey narrative, as well as how to utilize mechanics and systems as narrative devices. It was also the first game I developed where almost every asset used was created by myself, save for SFX. Most importantly, it taught me to overcome the hurdle of addressing serious topics in games, and allowed me to express my thoughts on the subjects of suicide and mental health in a way that will hopefully resonate with players.
-Documentation-
