Welcome to Lynn.Dream stay a while wont you?
Love, Ghana
Sky High
My project stretches across a multitude of mediums, as I showed my
coding/design skills, my artistic skills, and my ability to pull
meaningful art from myself. I coded, designed and storyboarded my own Role
Play Game based on living with Bipolar Depression. It is programmed
through p5.js, and currently has 688 lines of code. I have struggled
through depression all my life, but was officially diagnosed with BPD my
sophomore year of high school. I felt extremely isolated in my experience,
because it felt like simple tasks like brushing my teeth, making food or
going to school were mini adventures- each one taking a chunk of life out
of me. My motivation to do anything or to have a successful day felt
completely out of my control- meanwhile my classmates were able to
self-motivate and not bounce around between two extremes. I wanted to
create an RPG that wasn’t really an RPG, because you’re not given much of
a choice. You as the player may want to open your windows or get out of
bed- but you are limited by your depression or mania. Whether you will
have a manic or depressive day is completely out of your control as I
programmed the code to pick your day randomly. I also wanted to subtly
characterize the depression/mania through my text. In the manic version of
my game, words and phrases might repeat. In the depressive version,
sentences are shortand disconnected. I connected my project especially to
a lecture about music hosted by Jason King, Steven Schick and Maggie
Rogers and the lecture on collaboration and emerging technology - as
technology boosted my ability to express myself artistically for this
project. I wanted to juxtapose the happy 8-bit music and pixelated style
to the taboo subject. I feel like music is the backbone of any interactive
project- because it holds so many personal emotional connections within
it. I chose a pixelated format because 8-bit music tends to remind people
of arcades, and more generally, childhood. Personally, when I go through
Manic Depressive episodes, I tend to feel infantilized due to my inability
to do simple tasks. I feel the 8-bit music helped me get that child-like
vibe, and it also hammered home the point that these morning tasks are
difficult- similar to a mini quest. Creating an RPG allows the user to
walk a little bit in my shoes by allowing them to feel the frustration I
feel when you don't have enough energy to open windows or feed yourself.
My goal in the future would be to expand this piece into a full blown mini
walkthrough game, with maps, goals, health/energy meters etc. I would love
to do little tricks with them as well, like offsetting the controls a bit
when going through a depressive episode- or making your character have
drag when manic.
Good Morning Project