Mental

Jan 2022 - May 2022

Platform: Roblox

Engine: Roblox Studio

Team size: Solo

Duration: 6 months

Play it now on Roblox!

Game overview

Mental is a single player 1st person perspective narrative game with a bleak, eerie atmosphere. You wake up in a place of mental health healing. For your recovery you need to eat, but food isn’t easy to get… interact with the other residents and partake in their black market for food.

Mental is an experimental narrative experience that explores hardships of the mind in a surreal mental health institution. It’s a passion project that started as a tool to learn the Roblox Studio engine in order to understand it better for production and design for Amber Studio projects.

Project goals:

Learn to use the Roblox Studio engine.
Develop skills on narrative systems and game writing.
Develop a game as a means of expression.
Self publish my work.

Skills used:

Narrative design: world building, story beats, storyboarding, dialogue, barks.
Narrative systems design.
Game design: Player interaction, player experience, game progression.
3D level design
Playtesting and iteration.

Design goals

Create an atmosphere that conveys artificiality, despair, numbness, surreality, absurdity and boredom.
Display, through dialogue, barks, and game objectives, an expression of hardship of mental health healing processes.
Tell a story through the environment.
Encourage players to ask themselves deep questions and find endogenous meaning in the game story symbols.
Narrative objective: Mental health recovery is hard, even in the simplest things, which seems absurd and surreal. Perspectives of sabotage, resignation and hope.

Game aesthetic and progression

A perspective of a healing process, the ups and the downs: through hope and commitment, to hacks, to self-sabotage and despair. Surreality of dissociation and the lenses of mental health issues.

I start off by setting a clear experience pillar, which I call the aesthetic. This will be my “why” while taking design decisions. I like to think every part of the design should contribute to it (except for other constraints because of outside limitations). Since I am making this game as an expression (in order to connect deeply with players) I am taking a top-down design approach, inspired by the MDA framework created by Robin Hunicke.

Narrative structure

Act I: setup

The first act teaches the player in a contained environment the basics of the game (narrative interaction), places intrigue about the world setting and sets a clear objective for the player. Find food in the cafeteria.

Act II: look for food

The second act gives the player more freedom, to explore and interact with the world. Upon deciding to reach the cafeteria, they are confronted with the difficulty to find food and it becomes a puzzle they need to solve by following the narrative.

Act III: find the macabre

This act consists of a final challenge and the narrative climax. All narrative lore adds up to solve this final puzzle and reward the player with resolution and recognition with a narrative question for them to continue on following chapters.

Characters

skeletons

Despair, resignation, insecurity: a ping pong player that refuses to pick up the ball to play again. A skeleton that just looks and refuses to participate.

zombies

Self sabotage, unhealthy coping mechanisms. Duo organizing skeleton fight clubs. A zombie that abuses potions.

humans

Hope, confronting nihilism and absurdism. Papillon (butterfly) looking for meaning in books. Camus, that exchanges potions for fun.

The characters represent a different perspective on healing.

Which one is the player?

Symbols

potions

lollipops

Restraint.

Double-edge swords.

radio playing ping pong sound

sandwich

World-views, smokescreens.

Effort on recovery.

Narrative system

The narrative system consists on a feature that displays saved dialogue upon interaction, choosing from a branch depending on game progression, items held or other conditions met.

I built this upon an existing system within the community that displayed saved dialogue, adapted it to my own game by changing its design so it could fit the conditions and branching that I wanted.

Design Decisions

Roblox platform

The project started in the roblox platform as means to understand the engine. I played with this constraint along with the design. Since one of the main pillars was surreality and the theme “mental” I decided Roblox’s look contributed to the game looking toy-like, bizarre, if the atmosphere around it was right, closing in to the uncanny valley.

Some drawbacks of this decision were:

I wanted the game to be a medium of expression, narrative based, single player, dealing with philosophical and deeper subjects. This meant that my target audience would be small given the trends of the platform and less people would be willing to support its development. Also I would have to adhere to community guidelines regarding mental health issues.
Excluding social mechanics and features would mean that user acquisition would be much harder since most of Roblox popularity is reached that way, through social interaction and word of mouth (this conclusion was reached through extensive investigation).

Regardless, by continuing with this platform other project goals were met:

Simple publishing and distribution: which would help me self-publish my first solo developed game.
It would help me better understand the platform for production.
Faster development with uncanny valley community assets that I could easily alter to fit the atmosphere.
Acquiring knowledge and skill on narrative systems and narrative driven games.
Narrative, horror, and dream-like games are niche but rising in popularity.

Bleakness, boring

The visual aesthetic I looked for was one of bleakness, even boring. This might go against the search of “fun” in games, but I decided I wanted this to be a different “experience” that painted what struggle in mental health could look like. I would alter the assets I used from the community, like chairs, beds, or skeletons, and erase their textures and substitute them with a “medium gray” color.

This also supported my limitations as a solo developer, giving it a minimalistic approach while maintaining an elegant, consistent and coherent design. This let me play with the lightning and focus on the narrative to give an “institutionalized”, “artificial”, “lab-like”, “fake” feeling.

Surreality and absurdity

Making sense when nothing seems to have meaning, questioning your beliefs, confronting difficult shades of reality makes everything distorted. What is real and what is “mental”?

“What is it that we cannot imagine?” A question made by surrealists. This experience paints a process where everything might seem like a dream or a nightmare, where things seem like they don’t make sense… but don’t they?

What does a game, which whole plot and goal is eating a sandwich, tell you about mental health?

Production

I used trello to organize my goals and disseminate them into tasks. This helped me track my process, keep an eye on my scope, prioritizing features that would lead me to a complete product, and visualize my goals and achievements, which kept me motivated and focused.

Post-mortem

What went right?

The atmosphere conveys an uncanny feeling with a minimalistic approach.
The game progression was better understood through playtest iterations.
The game feels like a complete product, even though it features just one chapter.
The plot and game world were well received and emotions were well conveyed.

What went wrong?

Staying motivated in a solo project can be hard and it was difficult at times to keep going, especially with an emotionally hard subject.
I could let my scope out of my view and keep expanding it because of “passion”, delaying the deadline.
I focused on details at first, such as atmosphere, instead of a full prototype where I could see and test the game as a full cycle; this impacted my motivation (not seeing progress) and delayed the deadline.

What have I learned?

Constantly checking your scope and prioritizing is very important in any project, and a very important motivator in a solo project, since progress is more visible.
Focusing on a prototype that people can play should come before details. This foundation makes a better product in the end and reduces scope creep, since game design is better established.
Style and elegance in design and atmosphere can be achieved with a clear design goal, keeping the aesthetic and main pillars in mind, even with a low budget (3d model skill limitations, deadlines, and solo development).