Understand loved ones with depression
I got inspired to create this game after seeing my friends struggle with depression. When they returned home, the pressure from their parents made their condition worse, even though their parents genuinely wanted them to get better.
In East Asia, parents push their kids to study hard and care only about their grades. Many of my friends suffer from depression, and some even take a gap year to deal with their mental health issues. Therapists say that sometimes the child is the "most mentally healthy individual" in the family, so just treating the kid doesn't solve the problem; they get depressed again when they go back home.
This game aims to educate parents on how to understand and support their depressed child, going through this tough journey together as a family.
In this short and impactful game, players learn about both incorrect and effective ways of caring for kids with depression. The goal is to raise awareness about the importance of educating parents to support their children and help anyone in their lives who may be facing depression. Through this empathetic experience, I hope to create a more compassionate and supportive environment for those dealing with mental health challenges.
I used Unity 2D as the game engine and added stable diffusion v1.5 and v2.1 for the visuals. Additionally, I used webui to run the model, and ChatGPT helped generate the script.
At first, stable diffusion's output was not stable, but I managed to fine-tune my prompt and use inpainting to get the desired results.
I'm happy with the art resources I created and found a pipeline that suits my workflow. Stable diffusion now produces different images with the same style, and I look forward to using it more in my future game development.
I learned how to get stable results from stable diffusion and how to build a Unity game running on the web.
Due to the short development time, the game is currently more like a Visual Novel. In the future, I plan to make it more interactive with player choices. I'll also include a dictionary to educate people on what phrases they should and shouldn't use when talking to someone with depression.