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About The game

Unlike physical disease, it is often difficult to notice a patient suffering from mental disease. With the increase seriousness of youngsters’ metal illness in Hong Kong, it is important to raise the public’s awareness of the situation and offer help to the young generation. “A Journey Called Growing Up” is a 2D puzzle game that helps the public to have a better understanding on the challenges and difficulties faced by the youngsters when they grow up. The game aims at delivering the messaage: “youngsters need external help for their mental health issue”. Players will be encouraged to care more about the youngsters after experiencing the game and help creating a mentally healthy young population.

Objective

Help youngsters to express themselves

It is difficult for youngsters to actively express their mental health problems. The game will act as a medium to expose their issue and get public’s attention.

Raise awareness

The game will try to tell the public what the youngsters are facing and encourage people to offer suitable support. Besides, the game will also help youngsters to pay attention to their own condition and encourage them to seek help when necessary.

Methodology

Technology used: Unity (a game development engine), C# (programming language used by Unity)

Development process:

The project will first go through a research and design process. This includes research in the relationship between video games and mental health, analysis on existing and similar game, a draft of game design (mainly the puzzle design) and story design. The genre of the game will be 2D point and click puzzle game. Puzzles will be designed to be able to reflect the challenges faced by the youngsters in different stages including children, teenagers and young adults. The story will also be designed to deliver the core message of the game.

After that, an agile approach will be used for the game development. Individual puzzles will first be developed with a process of a loop of game design, implementation and playtest. Playtest will be conducted on each puzzle. Changes may be made to the puzzles from time to time according to the feasibility and playtest on the intermediate product. The puzzles will then combined together to form different game scenes. Playtest will be conducted again on each game scene. This stage focuses on the feasibility of creating the puzzles in Unity, so only simple and draft graphics will be used.

Once the core gameplay (the puzzles) of the game is finshed implementing, the game will be polished with details graphics and other game elements (e.g. sound effect, menu, setting page, end scene, background music, etc.). A final playtest will be conducted on the whole game.

The final deliverable is mainly the final game. A survey will be used for collecting player’s feedback.