Inspiration
As our team had our own experiences dealing with depression and social anxiety, some of us had prior exposure to some mental health-related self-help apps. However, we found most of them ineffective mainly because of ourselves— most of us usually did not sustain the mental wellness routines. Speaking with friends and other anonymous users, we realized that this is a common occurrence.
Then, an idea hit us: if we can somehow find a way to make the conventional process of journaling and learning of mental wellness techniques more exciting, users will then be more inclined to sustain their mental wellness routines.
What better way to do so by gamifying that process and combining them into an RPG?
What it does
The Catalyst RPG, at its core, is still a mental health self-help app with a slight twist — the 2 typical features (Journal and Mental Wellness Techniques) grant Stat Points that upgrades your character!
- Journal: Record your thoughts and feelings. Be it good days or bad days, you will be rewarded with Stat Points!
- Training: Feeling down? Stressed out? Or simply just being curious? Learn some techniques that can improve your mental wellness and be rewarded with Stat Points!
Note: There are already stakeholders (such as Chatty Caterpillar) who have indicated their interest in collaborating and providing mental health resources/techniques to be featured in our game.
These Stat Points are then translated into in-game abilities for the user in Adventure Mode.
In Adventure Mode, the users get the opportunity to go through a storyline that showcases the struggles and misconceptions of mental health. We hope that through our story, users can empathize with them better and be empowered to play a more active role in rewriting the mental health narrative together.
Ultimately, we hope that our RPG can help achieve the following:
- Encourage users to continue journaling and applying mental wellness techniques
- Equip all youths with mental wellness techniques
- Educate youths on mental health conditions and misconceptions to cultivate empathy and rewrite the mental health narrative
How we built it
We employed the use of Unity to help with starting our prototype as it possesses features that supposedly makes it easier to develop a game. In addition, we used Unity Collab so that our team can work on the project concurrently.
Challenges we ran into
While our team have prior coding experience, none of us have experience in game development or Unity. There were many bugs that we needed to resolve and it was really frustrating and tedious.
Additionally, it was a race against time. We realized it would be impossible to code every feature within such a short time span. Therefore, we had to make some sacrifices to get our prototype up and running before the deadline.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite being incoming freshmore students with limited coding experience, we are glad to be able to produce a game prototype that showcases the intended features of our idea.
The team is also glad to be able to quickly pick up Unity to enable turning the idea into a reality.
What we learned
Rather than saying what we learned specifically, we would say that this hackathon was an eye-opening experience (and therefore, a big learning experience) as most of us did not participate in an overnight hackathon before.
On my end, I am glad to be able to network with the amazing team from PALO IT as I have learnt how to further improve my resume.
What's next for The Catalyst RPG
We definitely would like to continue working on this project with interested parties! I will be pitching this idea to some stakeholders after the hackathon.
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