Waterloo Chronicles

Study notebook, used during study options.
You looking at yourself in the mirror when you are at the 4th level of depression.
You looking at yourself in the mirror when you're not depressed.
Story board - 2
Story board - 1
Screencap from the game minus game controls

Inspiration

Waterloo Chronicles is inspired by the aim to raise awareness about mental health challenges among university students and staff, specifically focusing on the complexities of depression and its impact on academic life. As students at the University of Waterloo, we decided that creating a game using our own experiences and feelings could help students and support workers see how university students are feeling and have they navigate life in university.

What it does

The game immerses players into the life of a University of Waterloo student, navigating academic challenges and emotional struggles, notably centred around depression. It offers a narrative-driven experience where choices significantly affect the protagonist's mental health and academic journey.

How we built it

We first sat together and brainstormed potential ideas. Our ideas eventually converged to create a visual novel. To begin we started writing a storyboard listing characters, potential events, and game tracking systems all within a google document. After getting a solid plan out we delegated our work. One of us began writing the scripts and dialogue, figuring out the storyline and individual events with input from the rest. We created an extensive flowchart explaining our plot idea. Next based on our scripts another team member worked to have a unique art style for all our assets from background to characters in Procreate. We even made our own custom music on Flat.io. Finally, we pieced things together, adding dialogue to art and tying it together with the help of Unity and C#. We couldn’t complete the entire game but we created a start of a great future project.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we had was coding in Unity. This was the first time we all worked on game development in such a setting and hence we had to familiarise ourselves with a lot of new tools. We had great aspirations but had to temper them by the limitations of our technological literacy. However we overcame that by helping each other at what we were individually good at and delegating tasks to ensure we had a visual novel by the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proudest of the way we quantified depression within the code of our game. Throughout the story, there are spots where you can either gain, lose, or remain at the same number of 'points' towards depression. Once you surpass a certain number of points, you can gain a level of depression. Gaining a level of depression changes the image of yourself you can see in the mirror (showcased in our demo). Overall, there are 5 levels of depression, and the deeper into your depression you go the less choices you're offered, as your depression becomes so strong that you push others away.

What we learned

Making a game was something we all wanted to do. We had an amazing idea and were super committed to creating Waterloo Chronicles. We picked up lots of skills from script writing, and art design to learning Unity from scratch. These all are invaluable skills we can use in the future. However, the biggest takeaway was that a project as big as this one deserves more time and dedication. Making a game is hard and we have a newfound respect for development studios out there.

What's next for Waterloo Chronicles

Our next steps involve expanding the game to include third and fourth-year experiences as we didn't have the time to be able to add them in given the time frame. When/if the protagonist graduates we want to create a way for them to look back on all the major experiences that shaped their university experience. We plan to introduce a wider array of choices and random smaller events to offer a more personalized player experience. Additionally, we aim to incorporate more mental health resources to allow the game to have a larger impact and better help students.