Living with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
DESCRIPTION
This prototype is my final year project, mainly a wrap-up of most of the mechanics learnt in university (further discussed in the other project pages). A huge amount of time was dedicated researching pedagogy techniques that can be transferred into game mechanics, and planning the process to result in a smooth development of the game. Some of the techniques used to increase knowledge retention are:
- Storytelling;
- Aristotle’s structure to create suspense and relief;
- Trial and error (multiple choice);
- Intelligent agent (therapist messages) providing additional medical information
Since the game handles a serious topic (mental health), it strictly follows 8 guidelines of how to portray mental health in games, such as including disclaimers, sources that can provide help, using appropriate language and avoiding stereotypes.
There is a quiz at the end for people to test their knowledge retention and understanding. The game was compared with a pamphlet (providing the same information) using the quiz and a user experience questionnaire; the results majorily favoured the game.
You can see code snippets here.
ENGINE
Unity
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
C#
PLATFORM
Windows/Console
GENRE
Narrative edutainment game
YEAR
2023
Screenshots
Trailer
Code
Sometimes I like to compare some of my latest projects with my first ones to see the progress. For example, the early projects use the “Invoke” method to delay an action, but one of the main problems with this approach is that you can’t specify parameters for the function.
While looking for alternatives, I got a liking into coroutines (Figure 1), which are used a lot in this project. However, there is still room for improvement, as the coroutine body is sometimes overloaded with actions. I try to balance it using comments so that everything is clear when I come back to the code after a long period of time.
Figure 2 illustrates one of my favourite methods of programming the movement of the main character, adapted for this game. In the first part of the game the player can only look around, but in further levels they can also move, which means the camera also rotates the body horizontally.
Figure 1 - First part of the thought bubble coroutine
Figure 2 - Movement Script