Smora the (mental health) Explorer

Game for children to understand that mentally different != normal

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Inspiration

I've always been told that everyone has their own challenges to overcome. However, to a child with autism, depression, or a similar developmental/mental disorder, these challenges can result in the child feeling estranged and "weird", further removing the child from society. If the child could see that they are normal because everyone's 'weird', they might mind their disorder less, moderating the social awkwardness inherent in the disorder. The s'more sprite was because Mollie brought a stuffed s'more to the hackathon and decided to make the simple shape into a simple 16x16 sprite.

What it does

64x64 sprite of a s'more moves around the scene, talking to neighbors who display aspects of certain mental illnesses but continue to be happy and greeting S'mora. After talking to all of them, the s'more enters their house, where they look in the mirror. The child decides whether they feel 'normal' or not, and an affirming, supporting message is delivered either way.

How we built it

Processing is a Java-based language which is much more visual-friendly, which Mollie coded in. Sprites, the second room, and the endings were drawn in GIMP by Mollie, while Christina used a drawing tablet for the introductory screen and first room.

Challenges we ran into

Mollie was hoping to implement a non-overlapping segment of code so that the s'more could not overlap the other sprites, but this was nixed when the attempts failed repeatedly over two hours and Mollie realized that there were more-important tasks to complete. On the bright side, when Processing crashed after this, it only lost a small amount of unsaved code. Also, the first attempt at movement was a three-hour attempt completely destroyed and started again.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mollie's proud of implementing an effective arrow-key control system and coding an ellipse and tringle together to make a speech bubble. She's also proud of fitting most crucial text in the speech bubbles.

What we learned

We learned how to work in Processing and its differences from vanilla Java. We also learned how to create even-pixeled brushes in GIMP, which is a necessity to ensure that the 64x64 sprite looks like a 16x16 sprite.

What's next for Smora the (mental health) Explorer

Expanding the game beyond 2 rooms and fixing the render of the second room (the s'more sprite was meant to approach the mirror, but due to the software and inability of the coder this was run before the s'more entered the room. Making sprites as .gifs instead of stationary images was also a goal not realized.

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