Mind Cleaning

WASD - Move about.

Space Bar (When prompted with Progress Bar) - Fill Up Bar

Welcome to Bushy's Spring Home. You must help him clean, for cleaning is what he does to forget about all of his worries.

I had a "friend" once who lost a friend at only 17 years old. It didn't do well for "him" emotionally, and my "Friend" was in a very weird place for a long time. I don't know if "he" had depression, or if he was just generally  upset, separate from the mental illness. . "He" couldn't  sleep for a long time, and "he" would say dumb things to his friends without even thinking about it. For "him", cleaning up was the one thing he would do to get "his" mind off things. I think, though, "he" needed to learn that it is okay to open up to others and be a bit selfish, as long as you are open up to others doing the same. Okay, I think we get the point that this is suppose to represent me, so I'll stop being coy now. When I lost my friend, I wanted to deal with it, then get over it and return to normal. This included never talking about him in college. Cleaning was something I would do whenever I felt upset, but it was not a good solution. I had to learn that opening up was the best thing one can do, and making this game represents me putting my thoughts into concrete matter. 

It was weird doing this topic. I was very coy about it to the others in the class, and I even made up a fake script to make sure no one gets what I am truly doing until the day came. This game utterly wrecked me emotionally, because I had to deal with things that I was scared to do: Using my friend's death as a topic of gameplay. In my mind, I wondered "What are the others going to say about this?" and I flipped flopped between thinking "These people in high school were not my friends" and "These people were the only true friends I ever had". However, every line of code and every face I made in Blender, made me feel alive. It made me think about all of these thoughts I had been putting aside, that depression I felt, and finally kill it for good. I became reborn! And Unity only had to crash once to teach me that! (Literally 3 hours before the deadline Unity crashed). Do I regret doing this topic? In a way, my mind says yes. Putting up the fact that my friend died so early in his life to the public (and a classroom...oops) might not be the best thing. I don't want anyone's pity, truthfully. But at the same time, my heart says I did the right thing. It's like how Spider-Man used Uncle Ben's death to drive him to become a hero. He didn't suppress it at all. I'm Spider-Man, and I'm not the only one.

Development went very nicely. I did a lot of scoping down, of course, but I was done with a lot of things very early on. Everything was fun to do, but I loved using physical objects to create things for the game. I used Lego and minifigures to get a sense of scale for the levels and such. The least fun part would be when things were going too smoothly, as I would get paranoid that something would go wrong! I doubted myself a bit with the dialogue, as I felt as though it was very edgy, but I think its fine to follow my heart. Overall, this project gave me an idea of good workflow. I just need to use a planning board again, like hacknplan.