Week 2 — One Button Game — Depression Battle [Creating Immersive World]

Depression Battle is a shooting game where players need to fill up the depression monster with the positive energy before the negative atoms swallow everything.

The Concept

• You wake up one day realizing that your negative energy is drenching you. You have to battle with your inner depression monster (a sphere shape).
• You need to shoot the positive atoms to the monster and fill up the hole before the monster gets feed by the negative atoms
• The monster is not an easy one to beat. It spins and distracts you. So you have to stay focus and not let your world get spinning.
• You win the game once the monster is filled up with all the positive energy. It got beaten.

Why?

• This one button game is to let the player know the strenuousness of battling with the depressions, and the importance of the mental health.

Audience

• Depression Battle is a light-weighted game that fits anyone who just wants to use their spare time to play one or two rounds of game.

Rules:

• The rule of this game is quite simple and easy. You have unlimited positive atoms, and all you need to do is to fill up the monster with these atoms. However, the monster itself produces the negative atoms automatically. The negative atoms swallow the positive energy that you send.
• If the positive atoms can surround the negative atoms, the negative one will be decreased, then you need to replace the hole with the positive one.
• The player win the game when there’s no negative energy inside the monster anymore.

Gameplay:

Setting:

• As I mentioned above, the monster spins and distracts the user. In the game, there are few level for the players to play. As the level gets higher, the spinning speed will be increased, as well as the speed of swallowing.

Challenges:

• The player needs to handle the spinning of the monster. At the higher level, the negative atoms might fill up the monster faster than your reaction. The player will see how the speed changes in the game.

Features & Mechanics:

• The core feature of the game is shooting. The player can only click (or touch the screen on the phone) to send the positive atoms.
• The algorithms will generate the negative atoms and randomly pop up on the surface of the monster. Also it can detect if the negative atom is surrounded by positive atoms (up down left right), if so, remove it.
• The spinning and the swallowing speed will be faster after each level.

Internal Economy:

• The player only has one life. If the monster is swallowed by the negative energy, then you die. The score is based on how many positive atoms that you send in each level. It will be higher if you spend less energy (positive atoms) to achieve the goal.

Game Balance:

• Positive Feedback: You enter the next level!
• Negative Feedback: Sorry you failed. Click to restart the game.
• The difficulty can’t be changed manually. The lower the level, the easier the game is.

Prototype Interface

I made a really sketchy game animation and here is it: