Awards

1st Place Award at the 10th Annual Virtual IEEE GameSIG Intercollegiate Computer Game Competition

Game Overview

Using a visual novel style, You Don’t Look Sick challenges players to complete a resource management based narrative through a month in the life of their character. The end goal is to successfully pay all of their bills and rent by the end of the month. (Our vertical slice takes players through the first week of gameplay, with a goal of paying the phone bill.)

Similar to real life, players must balance their energy, health and wellness by cleaning their apartment, eating, showering, sleeping, managing their social life, and keeping their job. All while dealing with the symptoms and complications that come with an invisible illness and hidden disability.

Expanded Description

What’s it like living with a chronic illness or disability? Christine Miserandino was asked a similar question by a friend; her answer was Spoon Theory. This metaphor uses spoons to explain the energy availability or lack thereof often experienced by people with these challenges. (We are inspired by but have no direct relation to the Spoon Theory.)

So, what is it really like living with a chronic illness or disability? Even simple everyday tasks turn into chores of immeasurable proportion. For some people, a basic morning routine can take almost all the energy they have for the day.  Then the rest of the day becomes a delicate balancing act where each activity has a cost and some things have to be done. There can be good days, and there can be bad days, but every day is a challenge of some kind or another.   

You Don’t Look Sick starts players at one of the major turning points of adult life: graduating high school. They want to prove to their parent they can be an independent adult, so must get a job and a place to live. On the surface it’s a text-based life simulator, where players get to explore adult life through core and random events split into basic daily time slots. However, there’s a catch: they have a chronic invisible illness and disability. Each day, players will start with a limited number of energy and they must accomplish all the things needed to keep themselves happy and healthy without their health or wellness reaching zero. 

Each day in game is broken up into basic time slots: morning, midday, evening, and night—with mini-slots in-between with options for transportation. Each block can contain one core event and has the potential for random events to occur. Players must choose their responses to these events to balance their energy and other needs, such as health, wellness, money, and relationships with other characters. At the end of the day, players will receive a summary of their end-of-day stats, including expenses, and then will see the day advance to the next and wake up with replenished energy and new challenges to face. 

At its core, You Don't Look Sick is meant to be a cathartic experience for those with disabilities and/or invisible illnesses. It allows them to feel seen and represented, while also giving them a platform to help share their experiences with others. The game will ultimately end after a month of players living in their new apartment, with different endings depending on whether they were able to pay all of their bills or not (and the relationships they have with other characters in the game). The explicit goal is for the character to pay all of their bills and rent by the end of the month. However, the game itself is aimed at teaching players that it is okay to have limitations, to not be able to do everything, and to get help for things when needed, especially as it relates to someone living with a chronic illness and/or disability.

Limitations

As in many projects, scope is the largest limiting factor of You Don’t Look Sick and the experiences it aims to create. A fully realized version of the game concept would allow for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses to share their own personal stories and to have input on the development of the story as it relates to them and their different identities. As it stands, You Don’t Look Sick focuses only on the symptoms and common effects of disabilities and illnesses as reflected in their energy usage and the balance they require between physical health and mental wellness. In the real world, different identities (especially those faced with oppression) intersect and create widely varied experiences. A perfect version of the game would account for all of these variations, and therefore, the lack of representation in this matter must be considered when exploring further research on how You Don’t Look Sick relates to people of all identities.

Current Progress

You Don't Look Sick is currently in-progress, with plans for general completion later this year. We currently have released our Vertical Slice, which takes players through the first week of gameplay with paying their phone bill as the goal. 

 It will be released for free on Android via the Google Play store upon completion. Windows and Mac builds are provided for ease of playtesting, but the preferred (and supported) platform is Android. So if you're playing it for Windows or Mac please play with touch-style controls in mind. 

Credits

This project is being created as the Thesis Project of Bryanna Menard, an MFA Game Design student at Laguna College of Art and Design. Specials thanks go out to all the professors and faculty at LCAD that have helped along the way. 

Team Members

• Project Lead: Bryanna Menard

• Art Lead: Jillian Ozasa

• Audio Lead: Patrick Menard

• Programming: Bryanna Menard

• Writing: Bryanna Menard

• Location Backgrounds: Harold Blake - Zixian (Tony) Guo - Han Kang - Christina Miller - Jillian Ozasa - Spike (Lilith) Short

• Character Design: Harold Blake - Sona Joo - Jillian Ozasa - Heather Wright 

• Loading Screens: Han Kang

• Icons: Zixian (Tony) Guo - Amanda Jospeh - Kangjie Zhan

• Promotional Art: Cheyenne Isola - Heather Wright 

Plugins

• Game Engine: Unity

• Narrative Scripting: Ink - Ink Unity Integration

• UI Plugins and Scripts: Audio Fade - Custom Tab System - Flexible Grid Layouts - Procedural UI Image - Progress Bars - ScrollRectEx - Simple Scroll Snap - Text Animator - UI Gradient

Sound Effects

• FreeSound: cloe.king - JohnsonBrandEditing
• Ultimate Sound FX Bundle
• Universal Sound FX
• Bus Theme: Tim Pryor

Font

• Roboto

Known Bugs

• Not all narrative paths were able to be tested, so there's a minor chance some may end in either awkward double-layering of choices or a blank screen (game breaking). Ideally we caught them all, but if you find one let us know!
• Newer versions of MacOS may give a permissions error when the app file is opened. We are looking into a fix on our end, but until then it may be possible to update the permissions following the first answer here. This involves using the Terminal therefore we cannot officially recommend it and only suggest you try it if you're comfortable using the Terminal.
• Previous versions of the Windows Vertical Slice v2 build had a naming issue. Renaming the EXE to "YDLS Prototype" will fix it. A new file has been uploaded with the fix.