Myhal Mental Health Madness

Myhal
gameplay
tutorial

Inspiration

We noticed there were a ton of mental health websites and resources available to students, but they were marketed in a boring and patronizing way (or not at all). Also, there were so many websites and apps that it could get overwhelming for someone seeking help. Our game hoped to be an interface that gradually introduces new resources in a fun, accessible way. As for the style, we were inspired by retro pixel art games like shining gaiden 2 and Pokemon. The mechanics were inspired by gacha games (eg clash royale's box mechanic) where rewards are random, so people get hooked easily. The scenery is based on MY150 at Myhal at UofT.

What it does

It's a pixel art mobile game where you collect points by grabbing items that are good for mental health (nature, doggos, and ironically sleep). Some of these doggos will activate buttons, with links that take you straight to a random mental health resource. We hoped to gamify mental health access so people aren't as intimidated when seeking help.

How we built it

Unity and GIMP mostly

Challenges we ran into

Endless errors, mostly because we're bad at Unity. The score counter wouldn't work because it was TextMeshPro but the tutorial used Text. Audio and particle effects from things exploding had to continue after destroying the object, so we delayed the destruction and just disabled the renderer (which is dumb but whatever). The colliders sometimes triggered effects multiple times per sprite, and finding the right velocity for spawned projectiles took forever. There were about 20 layers of sprites and sometimes nothing lined up correctly.