Devlog 1

I’ve started working together with my classmate Nishita Rao, to create a game about anxiety for our final capstone project! We’re being mentored by Rahul Sehgal, a game industry veteran, who is keeping us on track and helping us make this game as impactful as possible.

After some brainstorming around topics and possible fields of research we settled on mental health and anxiety as a possible game topic. Especially considering recent times we felt like this could be an interesting game to explore…

Initial Concerns

Initial concerns have and will probably continue to be, the fact that the more we try to gamify and arcade-ify our game, the less authentic the experience of anxiety becomes. We need to strike a balance that keeps the user engaged, but also conveys the authentic experience that we want to convey.

Path Ahead

Our way forward now will be to reach out to a group of people so that we can interview them, and understand their lived experiences of anxiety. We want to get a feel for how they first realized they had a “problem” called anxiety, how they identified their triggers, if they have developed any coping mechanisms or even tips and tricks that they use to help manage their anxiety and what advice they would give to their past selves about the experience.

Personal Reflections

For me personally, I’m very much the kind of person who will get their hands dirty without thinking too much at the start of a project… That’s been a point in my creative process that I want to work on with this project. I want to spend that extra amount of time getting things sorted before moving on to production, so that we can minimize the amount of last minute changes and revisions that will inevitably come our way when we start developing this game. One of the things involved in that will be keeping an updated devlog going throughout the development of this project!