CONTENT WARNING: OCD, suicidal ideation.

Bitmap Game, "Process/Compulsion"

A game about walking through a typical episode of OCD-related intrusive thoughts.

What and Why:

I'm not entirely sure why, but when tasked with creating a game specific to "my story," I knew the most compelling narrative I could make would be an internal one. OCD has been a immense source of anxiety, exhaustion, and trauma for my entire life, far before I knew what exactly OCD was or entailed. OCD, as portrayed by most media, is a cute preoccupation with perfection - often people refer to thorough organization or an intensely completionist work ethic as "OCD" behavior. The reality is every waking moment plagued by a deafeningly loud internal voice trying its absolute best to deprive you of any will to live, let alone let you go outside or participate in a social life.

I used this assignment to document an experience that's a worst-case-scenario for most OCD sufferers: should you let up on constant mindfulness or fall into a self-conscious whirlpool of dread, you'll face the internal dialogue presented in the game without fail. The intent is to use an extremely desperate, time-sensitive exercise in self-doubt to convey how OCD can be an incredible hurdle to surmount and and entirey silent and permanent source of stress. The game itself went through at least 4 iterations, though each version maintained the elements of a "combat" system in which the player couldn't fight back.

How

The game uses the logic of a trip to a therapist's office as a jumping-off point for an example of exposure therapy, to date the most effective means of mitigating intrusive thoughts I've come across. The game is bookended by an external voice, though the playable sections are entirely internal and narrated by the players' consciousness. The player character is as much whoever is controlling the game as it is me personally, and the "combat" system I implemented attempts to best convey the endless myraids of thought-traps one can fall into that make OCD worse. The player can choose between 3 answers to any given self-doubting question with varying degrees of consequences: the logic closely follows common exposure therapy practices that emphasize acceptance and deemphasize internal conflict and truth-seeking.

Any given question can be answered by "yes," "no," or a hidden "maybe." Answers that actively seek reassurance accrue the most serious penalties and cause the constant bullets, personified thought-traps, to move faster and spawn with greater frequency. Answers that concede to the given thought accrue a far smaller penalty to reflect the effectiveness of acceptance in dealing with intrusive thoughts (for instance, acknowledging that you're a monster, regardless of the truth, does a bit to mitigate the power of intrusive thoughts). The hidden "maybe" reply is the most effective reply to the questions brought before you; the most difficult part of the years of exposure therapy I endured was coming to terms with the reality that OCD deals in absolutes. A firm "yes" or "no" implies the existence of a truth, a fault in logic when dealing with irrational thoughts that exist beyond the real world and beyond your own will. "Maybe" is the only way to move past intrusive thoughts, nullifying their existence and steeling yourself for the next barrage of fear-related thinking.

In addition to dodging thought traps and choosing the best answer, the game has a steep timer meant to best convey the extreme urgency with which OCD-caused panic attacks can wash over you. Often, these panic attacks straddle life and death, something the game illustrates with the final question concerning whether the player character should live or die. OCD and irrational, intrusive thoughts always prey upon the weakest and most sensitive psychological links, the ultimate of which is always questioning one's will to continue living. The question has no right answer, and only one is provided in the game, a firm rejection of the notion of self-death and a stride in the direction towards bettering oneself. The final cutscene details the simple truths that make living with OCD much more bearable: acknowledging love, community, and the gift of life itself is entirely essential to making it through a day in an obsessive-compulsive life. The ending montage is of an image of a crowd walking towards a sunset, the end of one day, and a march towards the next day that will bring with it the same challenges and be met with the same firm resolve.

Making the Game

I drew several storyboards for the game, none of which resemble the final product in the slightest. I knew from the get-go that I wanted elements from the Bullet Hell genre of games for its intense engagement and reliance on both skill and constant awareness. How this was to be imlemented, however, changed with each iteration of the game, with a fleshed-out version remaining present as a skeleton scene hidden within the game. I felt that controlling a character sprite would allow for players to disassociate so far from the questions at hand that they would be rendered ineffective, so I opted to make the questions themselves the hazards at play. There is no buffer between player and game, only a self-reflective experience marred by intensely personal questions and a barrage of ill-will.

Here are my two storyboards, the closest things I have to a formal proposal. They cut a bit deeper than the finished project so, be warned, they may be triggering:

Here's the second storyboard:

Since I was previously intending to implement a more traditional combat system, I opted to use the p5.play library. This allowed for rapid prototyping that got me to where I ended up: while the bulk of the library remains untouched in the 800+ lines of code, the general control scheme, detection of selected answers, and bullet animations are carried out by existing p5.play objects. A concept I fleshed out but didn't keep was a sense of Markovian logic (like a Choose Your Own Adventure) that would entail a branching tree of scenes that would change based upon previous decisions and outcomes. I elected to instead use the same few scenes but up the difficulty of the bullet hell depending on the player's choices, emphasizing the fight against the clock as opposed to offering more scenes with more decisions that would take more time to complete.

Something I implemented in almost every scene were jury-rigged timers set to run only when certain scenes were loaded. I used this timers to add the fading in and out effects at the game's beginning and end, and was very excited to use them as cues for audio playback. After using p5's sound library to play a score I composed myself, I realized I wouldn't wish having to use sound in p5 on my worst enemies. I still have trouble understanding how something as simple as playing back sound could be implemented so spectacularly poorly, and the end effect results in my audio being choppy and entirely without fades. Even worse, the only way I could figure out playing sound on cues was to control only the volume level, meaning all sound files are playing at once but only one is audible at a time. I assume this will impact slower computers (as if having 800+ lines of code in the first place wasn't bad enough) so I apologize in advance should the game play unbearably slowly.

There are likewise several bugs that come with the baggage of using p5.play, so a word of warning: when you get to the scene with the first question, IMMEDIATELY TAP EITHER A OR D to insure you don't die upon spawning to a deceptively powerful super-bullet.

A Brief Reflection

Going into this project, I assumed making a game about OCD would open avenues for catharsis and healing, and maybe allow for an oppourtunity to raise awareness about a condition that's largely misunderstood. I think I succeeded in making something that raises a few questions about life with OCD, but the experience of making the game was excrutiating and required revisiting the worst, lowest points in my life to draw out content. I still enjoy how the game turned out, especially as a text-based bullet hell, but if I could do it again, I would likely choose another subject to milk, which in turn would make for a longer game that ended in less piled-on anxiety on my end.