Talk To Me

Title Screen

Inspiration

Several presentations at our school about raising awareness of mental health encouraged us to create this project.

What it does

Through entertaining and encouraging messages delivered utilizing a visual short story, our project raises awareness about mental health, particularly depression.

How we built it

First we brainstormed ideas on how the style of the visual short story will look like. After deciding on a minimalistic/cartoon art style, we began designing the story. We wanted an engaging and meaningful message while keeping the story short. After creating the outline of the story, we began adding dialogue and appropriate music to the game. But in order to make a really strong point, we also incorporated an emotive poem by Alex Elle that was relevant to our message at the conclusion of the game. We initially designed this story using java but we ran into many problems, specifically packaging executables, so we decided to switch to unity; a software that, although we had no clue how to utilize, was effective for creating games. We split up into parts to create parts of the game, ex: someone worked on the main menu, while someone writes code for the game or creates the images for the character. We used paint.net to create the characters and C# as the programming language.

Challenges we ran into

During these chaotic 36 hours, we had to overcome a number of challenges. Learning new pieces of software and languages, and working together to learn while viewing several tutorials was our biggest obstacle. We had never used C#, Paint.NET, or unity before, but we were determined to push ourselves and do something fantastic. Another problem we had was writing the story since we wanted to capture the player's attention and convey a meaningful message in a short period. The game is a lot shorter than we wanted it to be and that is mainly due to time constraints in addition to technical issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finishing the game considering we had no prior experience in all the resources we used. We are also pleased that we were able to create something that can help others and make an impact in people's lives.

What we learned

We learned something very important during this hackathon. In order to make the most of our time, we learnt how to acquire new things quickly and then share that knowledge with one another. This hackathon especially helped us gauge how much we can realistically complete in a short timespan.

What's next for Talk To Me

Talk to Me will continue to spread awareness and educate people about the serious dangers of depression and mental health. We advocate individuals to ask for assistance when necessary and check in on loved ones. Given the framework we created for ourselves. Adding more content to the game would be incredibly easy, which means it is very possible we could expand this to a full proper game.