Mindscape

About Mindscape

Mindscape was designed to be a simulation of Bi-polar disorder in a medium that could make it more understandable to a wider audience.

The gameplay focuses around one area which is split into two distinct environments. The left is a city scape and the right is a countryside-esque style. This is to represent the two sides of the brain. The areas are populated with buildings that the player can interact with, interacting with them will change their affinity and their colour depending on the time of day. The game cycles between a day and night time with some variation between the timers. Night affinity is purple and day affinity is cyan.

There are also small AI around the world that will spawn at a steady rate, these AI will spawn with an affinity of the time of day they spawn in. so there should be a steady mix of both night and day AI. These AI are hostile towards different affinities of both AI and buildings, and will try to flip the respective affinity.

Now what do all these affinities mean? Basically, there is a constant battle for night and day. This is shown as a bar on the bottom of the screen, and the more there are of one affinity the stronger that side gets. So thats the core loop, a ballancing act of trying to stop one side from being too strong and taking over.

Now, of course there are things that are in the game to switch up gamplay and make the player react accordingly. I’ll go into more detail down below.

Example of one of the Events

Events

Events were added into the game to make it more interesting, and were to make the player react to situations that need to be managed quickly, or let all chaos break out.

The idea behind these events was the unpredictability of bi-polar disorder. I went into heavy research and care into designing these to make sure what I was making was not insulting or misrepresentative of the disorder.

Some example of events are:

Slip: This event basically made all the buildings one affinity. And depending on the time of day in the game, it could be easier to deal with or difficult. The event was based off the manic and depressive phases of bi-polarism.

Migraine: This event added a chromatic aberration filter to the post processing and upped the aperture. During this time, game time would speed up, so the player would need to act faster to keep up on the situation.

Close view of surface gameplay space

Inspiration and Research

I made this game in about a space of 2 weeks early on at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown here in the UK. At the time of it starting, mental health was a major talking point and when looking around at representation of mental health in video games I felt it was severely lacking.

To change that I felt like I should try and at least help change that. I drew on experiences that I had expereinced myself personally, and from accounts from friends and people from around the world.

To help reinforce those accounts, I read many papers published from around the world about the definition and symptoms on depression and bi-polar disorder. This game is mainly about interperations of mental health, and to get a good idea on a more literary example of this, I read many books from Virginia Woolfe, Thomas Ligoti, Sylvia Plath and Sarah Kane.

This was a challenging project to undertake, as I had to be careful that I was being faithful to representations and not understating or overstating anything.

Example gamescreen in mid-play session

“Combat” and its Signifigance

So the AI don’t have a real reason or representation for being in the game. They are specifically there for gameplay sake.

Since AI attribute so much to the affinity battle, there has to be a way to deal with them. Since the Ai will attack opposite affinities it opens up some creative strategy to the player in whether or now they want to deal with them right away.

For example. if you are heading very quickl ytowards night affinity and a bunch of day AI spawn in, you wouldn’t want to remove them immediately, it would be smart to let them stay a while to help you balance out the bar. They would do this by just sheer numbers but by also getting rid of any night affinity AIs too, thus making the swing even harder.

Another way to deal with them is to drop “bombs” on them. These are slow moving projectiles that the player can fire from above to create a small explosion in a target area. These aren’t very accurate but they only hurt AI, so they’re safe to use and don’t punish the player much at all.