OVERVIEW
We invited players into a heartfelt adventure of One More Moment, where they guide their beloved pet through the afterlife, traversing five beautifully crafted stages of grief. This emotional journey helps players find solace, cherish memories, and reach closure, transforming loss into a celebration of love.
Through a VR experience, players are able to connect with Neo on a deeper level and use this game as a therapeutic, gameful experience for closure, reassurance, and comfort.
PROCESS
To start the process of this product design we were challenged by the prompt of How can immersive spaces help induce flow states and reduce anxiety through non-verbal interactions? Using this prompt we needed to figure out what are focus was and how we were going to address it.
PRELIMINARY RESEARCH AND IDEATION
To get an idea of how many people were affected by general anxiety disorders, we found that approximately 4% of the global population experiences an anxiety disorder, which translates to around 301 million people worldwide...
TARGETTED USER
The most common type of anxiety that many face is Grief anxiety. Grief of a family memeber is one that is most commonly faced by many causing those to have impact on three factors of their well being
WHAT IMPACTS DOES ANXIETY HAVE...
Mental
Fear, worry, persistent separation distress, acute pangs of severe anxiety, psychological pain
Physical
Chest tightness or heaviness, breathlessness, nausea, stomach upset, dizziness, headaches, numbness, muscle weakness
Behavioural
Changes in how you behave, including avoidance or maladaptive coping strategies
WHY A PET?
While there are many things in the world that bring people comfort and support, we thought of one that often holds a special place in people’s hearts—sometimes even more than other humans are pets. Pets are a source of connection that many share, with countless individuals expressing that their pets are:
Family
A large majority of pet owners consider their animals to be part of their family.
Emotional connection
People often form deep emotional bonds with their pets, experiencing love, companionship, and comfort from their furry friends.
Personality attribution
Owners tend to attribute human-like personalities and emotions to their pets.
Caregiving responsibility
Pet owners feel a strong sense of responsibility to care for and provide for their animals' well-being
Using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
The worst part of having a pet is the day that you lose that pet; it causes so much pain that can be unexplained. This sort of grief comes with many forms of anxiety which is why we decided to use CBT as the base research for our game to ensure that it was truly a therapeutic experience.
Grief-Related Anxiety:
Reframing thoughts: Helps us see things in a way that doesn’t make us feel worse
Facing fears little by little: Gradual reactions to triggers helps reduce fear and cycles of avoidance
Mindfulness (deep breaths, grounding): Techniques to help us calm down when emotions feel too heavy
Doing things we enjoy: to reduce feelings of helplessness
Grief processing: Helps us remember in a way that feels good instead of just painful
STORY AND NARRATIVE
To create a storyline with a flow, we used 5 stages of grief to create that therapeutic gameful experience to bring users the comfort they needed. With this experience, they would be able to experience ressurence and comfort in there own timely manner and with get the cherish the memories they also would have experienced with neo.
Key Tasks for Progression
For each stage we focused on the main interactions that user might face and how that might impact their experience.
Example of the depression stage key tasks:
Explore surroundings and walk
Discover bridge.
The player must cross to the other side of the river with Neo in order to reach the ending.
Convince Neo to cross the bridge.
Since cats are afraid of water, Neo is understandably apprehensive of crossing the bridge.
Find clues & items to encourage Neo.
The player must scan their surroundings and collect photographs that contain useful information about Neo’s likes.
Catch Neo’s favorite food, a fish from the lake.
Lure Neo over the bridge using the fish.
THE FINAL OUTCOME
We created a teaser to show the users what to expect when playing the game and how the key interactions work.
NEXT PROJECT
FACTORS
GAME DESIGN // PRODUCT DESIGN
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