PREMISE: Self Care Simulator was the first serious game I had ever worked on. Over the course of a three-week Summer session in Copenhagen, Denmark, I collaborated with a group of aspiring developers toward a game that dealt with a topic very near and dear to my heart--mental health. Our game's mantra, outlined on the loading screen, encouraged our audience to "always be kind." Juggling the everyday responsibilities of life is always hard; balancing mental health on top of it all can make things so much more difficult. Utilizing the Phaser3 Game Engine, our group built a prototype that aimed to not only illustrate, but accentuate the difficulties of this situation by putting the player inside the head of someone experiencing these challenges on a daily basis.
GAMEPLAY: In order to stay in the game, the player must maintain all five status bars: Exercise, Social, Food, Sleep, and Work. Each status requires a specific keyboard action to be refilled: to exercise, players must quickly alternate the left and right bracket keys; to socialize, players must correctly type out text messages; to eat, players must move their triangular avatar left/right with the arrow keys to catch food; to sleep, players must hold down the 'Z' key; to work, players must type out the numbers displayed on the calculator in correct succession. Only one of these tasks can be accomplished on the keyboard at a time, so players must divide their time accordingly. While at first, this may seem easy enough, soon mental health struggles will start to populate the screen. These events range from the benign occurrences of good days to the most debilitating lows of depression. Depending on both the nature and severity of each occurrence, these events will deplete the player's stats to various degrees. If any status bar falls above or below the denoted 'healthy' range, the player's overall health will decrease. When this reaches zero, the game is over.
PURPOSE: The goal of the game is to last as long as possible despite the obstacles thrown at one's path. However, one defining trait of the game is that there is no win condition--the game is always lost. What serves to measure success is the amount of time a player can last in the game before losing. The idea is that players will not only realize the effort one must devote to balance the demands of daily life, but furthermore understand the nuances of difficulty brought on by the added responsibility of managing one's own mental health. While at first this may seem manageable, in-game timers slowly speed up the progression of these status depletions to further illustrate the compounding nature of these struggles such that eventually they will become unmanageable, resulting in the player's inevitable loss.
GAMEPLAY: Players' initial stats revolve around a single random element: race. Based completely on die rolls, players are assigned one of four fantasy races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, or Orc. From this starting point, the character's randomly-assigned race will have resonating consequences throughout the entire course of the game. Race influences the likelihood for one's assigned starting neighborhood (Hut, Cottage, Tower), and these two factors in turn further influence the player's starting Health, Gold, and Prestige. These must be maintained during the journey across the board. Single-space events and cards drawn on Fortune spaces further affect these stats, the specific consequences of which are affected by race. Players will soon reach the Gates of the Academy, where they must choose which their education path. Higher education levels require more resources in order to attain.
GAMEPLAY (Cont.): After completing (or omitting) their education, players reach the Guild Hall, where they are given a random selection of jobs. Once again, the more a given job pays, the higher level of education is needed. As denoted on the board, a player's race combined with their education level and any added Prestige points they wish to spend decide how many job opportunities will be available. In the final stage of the game, players move around the loop at the far end of the board, collecting their salary at each Loot space. If a player has more than 60 combined Health, Gold, and Prestige (plus a 2d6 roll) at the Gates, they can enter the city. If not, they must continue advancing around the loop until all but one player has entered the city. The last player left on the board is the loser, stuck in a cycle of poverty.
PURPOSE: While addressing the topic of race can be sensitive and difficult in many situations, the aim of our game was to frame the lesson in a fantasy setting, making important discussions on the subject matter easier to engage in. Crystal City can be played by audiences of all ages, but we found that adolescent players could stand to benefit the most from playing. After exposing them to such recurring oppression (or for some, privilege) that feels undeserved and often unwanted, we hope to inspire questions in the players' minds as to how or why these racialized events can take place in a fantasy world, and furthermore the real world. The end goal is to foster projection of this critical lens beyond the scope of the game, and to equip our players with more empathy and understanding, when addressing race in their everyday lives.
PREMISE: Over the Summer 2019 term at UW-Madison, I worked with my Game Design I group to push out my first full-length analog game. Our projects had a strong emphasis on accomplishing a serious objective. We decided to tackle the topic of institutional racism. Players of Crystal City will move through an epic journey--many aspects of which will be heavily (positively or negatively) impacted by their character's fantasy race. In this world, rooted in racial hierarchy and Human oppression over the three remaining populations, the players' goal is to traverse the land and gather enough resources by the time they arrive to enter at the Gates of Crystal City, where the promise of a better and more equal future awaits.
*Full PDF of the game rules and more examples of Fortune/Job cards to be added soon.*
Note: This is a Video Game Project Portfolio
To view my Integrated Digital Art work, see Additional Content