Inspiration
We started by brainstorming game ideas that had to do with the theme: Education or Health. After coming up with a few ideas, we thought we could make our project fit both the themes, teaching about an aspect of health. While researching potential topics online, we came across articles discussing how individuals with certain mental health issues struggle with everyday tasks including cleaning. This gave us inspiration for educating people on disorders that affect one’s ability to clean, which then led us to hoarding OCD and hoarding disorder.
What it does
This game aims to bring awareness to the difficulties of living with hoarding OCD & hoarding disorder, and educate people about its existence. In the game, you must clean out your living space by tossing away some of your possessions. However, you have a list of requirements that you must fulfill, making it more difficult to successfully clean out your home.
How we built it
We brainstormed many project ideas before eventually settling on House of Clutter. Then, we combined images found on the internet along with designs we created ourselves (using Canva and Autodesk Sketchbook) to create graphics for the game. The game was made using Java (Eclipse). After putting everything together, we created the House of Clutter!
Challenges we ran into
- How to allow the user to drag and click on assets in the game
- Set all the game assets in the right place
- Deciding on game design choices to make the game more user friendly
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Created a functioning game
- Figured out how to allow the user to drag and click on assets in the game
- Checking if the user has successfully beaten the game
- Educating ourselves about mental health issues (specifically hoarding OCD & hoarding disorder)
What we learned
- How to allow the user to drag and click on assets in the game
- Writing text on to a java window
- How to better use Java file separators
- Information about hoarding OCD & hoarding disorder
What's next for House of Clutter
- Pop ups with information about hoarding OCD & hoarding disorder every time the player removes a piece of furniture
- Pop ups with thoughts of those who have these conditions every time the player removes a piece of furniture
- Add music and sound effects
- Allow the player to customize the house to their liking (infinite amount of all pieces of furniture including ones not used)
Try it out
To try out the project, go to the GitHub repository (linked below) and follow the instructions in the Readme.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.