Depression

  DEPRESSION

EMOTIONS

Depression is commonly associated with grief. It can be a reaction to the emptiness we feel when we are living in reality and realize the person or situation is gone or over. In this stage, you might withdraw from life, feel numb, live in a fog, and not want to get out of bed. The world might seem too much and too overwhelming for you to face. You might not want to be around others or feel like talking, and you might feel hopeless. You might even experience suicidal thoughts, thinking "What's the point of going on?"

Avoiding using the synonym method to open up emotional aspects that can be utilised in the design process of this stage I want it to be a very numbing area of the game, we are at the bottom, the lowest we can go and everything is dark, we've removed every part of us we can and have no assistance to go on having lost our AI companion with the secondary players icon becoming powered down due to distance between itself and the space shuttle being too far to connect properly. Yet we must go on.

Rain and water are often used in this stage of grief within games using it as a subject matter and much like the avoidance of volcanic eruptions to represent anger in previous stages I wish to look elsewhere to see if more unique alternatives can be found. The idea of reflection is important during this thought process - we often ruminate or reflect on past decisions and interactions during depression causing more emotional pain. After these memories are questioned during the bargaining stage we still often return to them knowing that they are in the past and cannot be changed and though this reflection can cause pain it is important to get to the understanding of where our emotions are coming from and accepting that things cannot go back to how they were though this can be somewhat of an uphill climb, much like the player character climbing back out from these deepest pits of the mine to once again reach the surface and attain their answers. 

Closer to where the volcanic eruptions and lava flows that created basalt rock formations on the surface in this setting much closer to the now dormant source the rocky textures would have been blasted by such incredibly high temperatures that the remaining material would have a glass-like design to it allowing the player character to view themselves upon the surface. What they have become but also that they are still present despite what they have lost they can still exist and move forward, and with the way back closed off due to environmental assets such as the loss of a boosted jump, terrain blocking them, or mechanical devices not being able to be interacted with because the secondary player is powered down.

Further development of this stage could lead to answers being found of how to get the player to move forward other than formats used in other games like being chased by an antagonistic character that personifies a player's own darkness or having assistance from other characters giving them the answers needed to progress. An intermittent powering up of the secondary character when the player does choose to move in the direction could alleviate the thought of going backwards though this cannot be a sustainable asset as the player character has to come to terms with their loss but also the realisation that they made it back to the surface by themselves thus they had everything they need to survive within them the whole time, also I need to be paying more attention to design of characters and environmental art rather than mechanics with it being the main point of my learning agreement with my own background in illustration. How can I artistically design elements of depression and the need to move through it within this project is the key question to be answered here. 

Looking at how depression has been displayed in other characters can assist with the player character design at this stage once all the parts of themselves they have removed have gone.

Having already discussed colours as a way of representing emotions and how the clean white armour of the space suit can get covered in the red dust of the planet during the mining stages of the game to represent anger, here the under armour components can be predominantly coloured blue, with broken pieces dragging along the floor from where pieces were forcibly removed or ripped off as a sign of desperation during the bargaining stage. Can oil or other mechanical fluids drip off like tears of sadness from human eyes during depression? Can this be designed in a temporary way so as to not be visible once the player as ascended out from the depression stage and into acceptance in a believable way, perhaps the blue hue of the underarmour is only present in the midst of all the dark obsidian around them in this area and once the surface is reached we can see from the daylight that it is all shiny chrome like something brand new being formed with the bits of the suit that were dragging along the floor snagging on rocky terrain and being removed like the painful memories we ruminate on during depression being reinterpreted with a more positive mindset as just obstacles that we overcame to be the person we are today and without them we wouldn't be here, turning them into a moment of empowerment rather than a reflection of where we went wrong.