Bokken

Role-Playing Game (RPG) that follows a struggling student as they combat imposter syndrome and overcome their inner demons while learning to generate self-compassion.

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Inspiration

For students, especially those in STEM, mental health issues arise from a variety of stressors like expectations, pressure, and imposter syndrome. As students in STEM ourselves we have found a lot of our peers struggle with the same things we do and wanted to provide a sense of reassurance in the format of something fun, like a game, to let everyone know they are not alone in their mental health struggles. The name, Bokken, comes from our own struggle in the STEM field as it was the name of a mysterious file that would show up in Unity. Beyond the subjective value for our team, the name Bokken is symbolic of the Japanese wooden sword and the idea that we all have our own fights to face and that the tools we need to face them are often within us. Within the game, Bokken is also a fun easter egg you can attempt to find and interact with!

What it does

This RPG puts mental health stressors in the context of a game where a player, as the main character, confronts their "inner demons" in the format of a fight. The game follows a player as they walk around a classroom and interact with others, learning about their various accomplishments in a parody of how a real classroom that creates an environment of low self-esteem may look. While the dialogue is exaggerated in the game, the same underlying principles and concerns are faced by many students in high-stress areas of study. When the player confronts a student who embodies the source of a common insecurity, they are taken to a "boss realm" where they fight the embodiment of the insecurity. Given the time constraint, the game currently focuses on only one boss: imposter syndrome. The boss manifests itself in the form of a demonized version of the player to showcase how our own insecurities can be detrimental to the environment around us and how we view the world. In addition, the game is fun to play!

How we built it

We began with research into what stressors our target audience faced. We consulted our own experiences, but also sent out a form to fellow students in order to get an informed idea of what to focus on. From there we drafted an idea for how we wanted to incorporate these ideas and how we wanted to portray our message. Once we had a general plan, we decomposed the project into smaller, achievable goals that we each tackled. We used Unity and PlasticSCM to create the game and Procreate to create the graphics and animations. In Unity we used C# to code the Scripts for the game which included things like buttons to move to different screens, managing dialogue, attacks and combat, and manipulating animations. PlasticSCM was used to collaborate among all of the team members and upload local files made on individual devices to a cloud to be "checked in". Once files were uploaded, they could be "checked out" by the other members of the team.

Challenges we ran into

As the first hackathon for several members of our team, we had no idea what to expect and had to deal with many issues. The first challenge that we ran into was having the project run on both Windows and Mac. This was especially difficult because this was the first time using Unity and coding with C# for most of us. In addition, we had to navigate around merge conflicts and deal with losing our progress from Unity crashing. The process of figuring out how to animate projectiles for the boss fight took many long hours of reading through the Unity documentation and watching youtube tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to begin developing a game when we began with such little experience. We are proud of creating our own unique fight mechanism for the game which makes it stand out compared to others. In addition, the visual graphics and animated movements in the game were hand-created by us. We are also very proud of how we implemented our idea and the purpose of the project as it is something we all resonate strongly with. Through developing this game, we all grew as people as we became better programmers and also learned about different ways to cope with mental health stressors. Coming in to the Hackathon, our goal was to have fun and learn as much as we can, and while we did that, we also accomplished so much more: developing a game!

What we learned

We all came into this Hackathon with no experience with Role-Playing-Game (RPG) Development, so working through creating a product we could showcase in this short amount of time taught us a lot about different game development skills and strategies to approach working in a team under a time constraint. Many of us started without experience in Unity, and while the learning curve was steep, by the end of our all-nighter, we all felt much more comfortable with utilizing game development knowledge and skills (even if we were less comfortable physically). Since we broke up the work, many of us learned different skills from aspects of development we were not previously exposed to. For example, we did not have designated designers and programmers as we are all more experienced with the programming side of development, instead we broke up the work and had to learn new skills in order to create the game we have. We also learned a lot about teamwork and collaboration as this was our first time working together on a project of this magnitude; despite this, we managed to work well together and create a project that we are all proud to present.

What's next for Bokken

Since there was such limited time, the current version of Bokken doesn't include everything we planned and thought of. There are many other features we would love to add given the time, including creating the code for other bosses and challenging out mental health stressors. Another feature we would love to add is music around the home world and boss world, and music that increases and decreases in intensity as you fight the boss. Furthermore, there was an environmental aspect to the game that we wanted to include, but did not have the time to fully flesh out. Ideally, the fight with the inner demons would symbolize a broader extended metaphor about our relations to the environments around us in the context of both our social environment and our natural environment. The initial idea was to have the background become less and less dull as you fight the boss to show it become a brighter place, a representation of how we personally can improve the environments around us. We also wanted to include more of a storyline to tie all the different characters together and provide insight as to why the main character struggles with what they do. Even though these additions would bring our brainstorming to fruition, we are still proud of the game we created and how far we got!

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