When I started this project, I wanted to look at why some students might avoid looking for help when dealing with anxiety or depression. From my research, I found that mental health support can sometimes feel intimidating or difficult to approach, especially for someone who may already be struggling.

My idea was to explore whether a serious game could make the subject easier to understand and give students another way of learning about anxiety, depression and the support available to them.

Project Goals

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  Help students understand anxiety and depression: Give students information about common signs and symptoms without making the experience feel overly clinical.
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  Help students recognise when something may be wrong: Explore whether a game could help someone recognise signs in themselves or someone they know.
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  Point students towards support: Make support information easier to find and encourage students to seek professional help when they need it.

Target Audience

The project was aimed at university students. Students can deal with a mixture of academic pressure, financial worries, changes in living arrangements and other personal challenges. Focusing the project on students also gave the research and design a clearer audience rather than trying to create something for everyone.

A large part of the project involved researching mental health awareness and the use of serious games. A serious game is designed for more than entertainment, and in this project I looked at how gameplay could be used to communicate information about anxiety and depression.

The research also looked at pressures students were facing at the time, including isolation following COVID-19, changes to learning and financial pressure from the rising cost of living. I also carried out interviews with five students as part of my primary research.

After the research stage, I started looking at how the project could work visually and how the website and game could connect together. I worked through the branding, colour scheme, website layouts and game interactions before building the final interactive prototype.

Changing the Scope

The original plan, which can also be seen in my scoping document, was to build both a website and a game as the final artefact. The aim was to give people more awareness of anxiety and depression while also directing them towards places where they could find support.

At the beginning of the project, the idea was aimed at the wider public rather than specifically at students. After discussing the scope and the ethical issues around the project, the safer option for the university project was to focus it on students. This meant changing parts of the idea and shifting the research over the first few weeks.

The scoping document also needed several changes. Some of this came down to the way I was writing about the subject. I was naturally writing in quite a sympathetic way, while I was being asked to approach it more as a researcher and keep the wording factual. Clearing this up, alongside the ethical issues within the document, took longer than I had originally expected.

Losing Time

During the university holidays I became ill for a few weeks, which interrupted the design stage. There were days where I could continue working and other days where I was not really up to doing much. When I returned after the holidays, I also had more feedback on the scoping document to work through before I could properly get back on track.

The design stage was where I started to realise that reaching full development was becoming unlikely within the time I had left. Some of the designs needed several rounds of changes following feedback from my supervisor, which meant more time was being spent getting the design into a position we were both happy with.

I also found it difficult to get students to take part in interviews. I eventually managed to interview five students, which my supervisor felt was enough for the project, and from there I was able to move forward with the design.

Changing the Final Deliverable

At this point I discussed the remaining time with my supervisor. Rather than rushing the website and game development, we agreed it made more sense for me to focus on producing an interactive prototype that could still demonstrate how the website and game were intended to work.

A few weeks before presenting the project, and around a week before the design and development submission, I ran into another problem. An animation I had created in Adobe Animate was not playing correctly, so I could not properly show what was meant to happen within the game. I decided to build a working version of that interaction directly in Adobe XD instead.

The final project therefore became an interactive prototype rather than the fully developed website and game I had first planned. It was not the original outcome I had aimed for, but it allowed me to show the idea, navigation and game interactions within the time I had left.

The project was submitted in 2023 as my final Honours Project. The finished artefact was an interactive Adobe XD prototype showing the website, support information and a working demonstration of the game idea.