Melancholy

This is Melancholy, my NCEA Level 3 Art Design project and my final art project from high school. My assignment was to produce 3 panels of work that advertised a product, campaign or other marketing opportunity. I chose to make a mock-up adventure game that acts as a “gamified screening test” for psychological conditions.

The brief provided in my portfolio goes as follows: “In the wake of both the recent pandemic and the fast-paced and constant development of the internet, mental health is anything but irrelevant today. More people are starting the journey of mental health earlier than ever before, however there is little they can do to educate themselves without the confrontation of oneself. ‘Melancholy’ is a psychology-based adventure game centred around this idea. This project aims to spread accurate and medical-grade information to the masses while providing solace for those currently struggling within the system and entertainment to Melancholy’s players. No person deserves to go through difficult situations without access to valuable resources such as those provided in ‘Melancholy.’ Ultimately, this project is a love letter to those currently struggling with their mental health and an offer of information to assist in their journey.”

Logo Development:

I wanted a logo that captured the essence of melancholy (the word and the game). Something simplistic but graceful with a hint of darkness. It should look natural and comforting yet strong enough to capture the audience. Line weight played a huge factor in logo decisions. Initially, I thought of using a simple lined logo as seen in the initial concepts. This was later developed into messing with line weight and font for a logo similar to that of Givenchy, just shaped a bit more.

 The final Melancholy logo utilises mirror imagery, varied line weight and juxtaposed fonts. The moth-like logo is also a quadrant mirror image of an M with added semi-colon detail on the ends, a common symbol for suicide awareness. The delicate logo image is juxtaposed with the bold font of the name, making for a more striking/eye-catching visual. The two versions indicate the logo against light and dark backgrounds, the second of which features the signature glow seen throughout the rest of ’Melancholy.’

Character Development - Anxiety:

At first, Anxiety was going to look more like a theatre mask creature with a million eyes, but I decided the initial concept looked too confident for anxiety, so I shifted gears. I decided to go down the route of animal inspiration as anxiety feels more animalistic than depression and mania, as anxiety tends to stem from a survival instinct, of sorts. I used images of hummingbirds, as they’re known for their speed and constantly high heart rate. I still liked the idea of multiple eyes, being hyper aware of one’s surroundings. I took style inspiration from NVM Illustrations to give a sketchy, jumbled feel. 

Character Development - Depression:

Depression was the first character I was happy with. They’re based off of a luna moth and their domain is an ocean of which their tears flood, adding the contrast between a delicate flying insect in a vast ocean as well as emulating a feeling of helplessness and drowning within your own sorrow. I added a veil as a symbol of constant mourning and to cover the face. I try to keep these characters faceless as I want to add a sense of alienation. These embodiments, while technically characters, should not be seen as such. Instead, they should be seen as ideas. 

Character Development - Doctor and Patient:

Naturally, you can’t have a video game without the player. These are the two possible characters a player can play as: The Patient and The Doctor. At first I just wanted to use a patient-like player avatar considering the aim of the game is to educate and spread awareness, but I think having two different perspective players will help both with engagement and possibilities for different endings (if any). I wanted to make these avatars as plain as possible to keep the focus on the disorders but still unique enough to keep track of movements and actions.

Character Development - Mania:

 I had a couple ideas for Mania, but none of them really stuck. Again, I wanted to keep from having a human-looking face, so I took one of my emulations and a beta design I had for Anxiety and used those to create a final design. I wanted to include the spiky mane thing to emphasise the nature of mania. It is upbeat and lively, like a spark. They represent a temporary state as mania in disorders is often in the form of a manic episode, not a constant state. The smile stays, though, similar to the Cheshire Cat. I emulated astrono77153462’s style, I felt the sharp shape language and contrast fit well with Mania. I don’t have many concept sketches of Mania as most of them are emulations or part of random sketches.

Character Development - Narcissism:

 I came up with this concept while doodling in physics class, I believe. My first thought when it comes to narcissism is ‘massive ego,’ so, naturally, I decided a peacock was the perfect representation of this. I also included some siren elements (fun fact they were actually described as having wings) and a porcelain mask to really sell that charismatic and manipulative vibe. I forgot that the tail plumage can fold back down, so I used that to my advantage in later concepts. I also found images of half albino peacocks, which I used as ‘best of both worlds but still not enough.’ This choice has an added bonus of the jumble of colouring kinda mirroring the delusional logic often associated with narcissism.

Posters - Initial Concepts:

The initial concepts for the posters were, at first, very close artist model emulations mixed with my personal style. The composition of the concept posters loosely followed the works of the Balbusso twins, but I added the white lines found in Karen Barbour’s work with the texture of NVM Illustration’s pieces to add more edge. The use of lighting and shading is a consistent trait through my own work. In the concepts we can also see some exploration of Hermann Rorschach’s ink blots for background texture. Some miscellaneous ideas include: shattered porcelain to resemble the fragile state of mental health, moths to signify change (similar to the death tarot card as moths are also a sign of death), and the details of the trees in particular are meant to resemble the nervous system or neural pathways within the brain.

Posters - Developments:

In the development stage of my posters I tried to figure out a more specific colour palette. I also took the time to play around with mirror imagery (akin to Hermann Rorschach) and the motif of insects and webs. Red outlines/boxes also make their first appearance here and I continue to use the white lines pretty heavily. A lot of the posters so far have been used to introduce the characters one-by-one, somewhat like looking through the DSM-5 case-by-case. I tried to capture the chaos and confusion of mental health by taking inspiration from the surrealist works of John Craig and jars.drawings. My aim is to show the audience familiar images in unfamiliar combinations to draw them in.

Posters - Refinement and Final:

Later refinements included my attempts to shift the tone of posters into darker elements. I took slightly more surreal routes using the eyes of Anxiety and more mirror imagery. The aim is to evoke an unsettled feeling in the viewer, the presence of eyes and mirror imagery are intended to make the audience feel like they are trapped and being watched. This might tie in with a personal fear of mine as well as I‘m easily freaked out by fractals (infinitely repeating patterns). More nerve-like tree texture and webbing helps to remind the audience of the bodily nature of a psychological state. Many disorders are caused by genetics just as many are caused by trauma.

The final ‘Melancholy’ poster takes inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ using sketchy lines and paper-like background textures to hint at the scientific nature of the game. The poster features the Patient—one of the playable characters—and the wings of anxiety and depression to foreshadow what’s to come. The ghostly textures and white lines of both sets of wings also help to achieve this effect.

Loading Screens:

You can’t have a video game without game visuals. These mock-screenshots act as loading screens for a potential website in which 30-second time lapses of each screenshot’s creation fill in the time to load. The recordings of the timelapses are provided by the link below.  

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ACE_EH_0nVTIXmqUlFU99oec4LAI8KCN  

As the loading screens are intended to be screenshots of gameplay, I tried to emulate real platformer gameplay including tutorial buttons, a ‘game over’ screen and level backgrounds.

Initial Concepts:

The initial concepts try to hone the textures and style of the game. While a lot of my posters were quite busy, the same doesn’t apply well when considering movement. I leaned heavy into darker colours and played around with lighting to keep the moody tone without losing track of where everything is.

Loading Screens - Developments:

Here I tried cleaning up the shapes and textures so the player avatars can be easily tracked. The struggle here was mainly with composition, figuring out what will draw the player’s attention the most versus what should be focused on. Developments also included health bars in the top left corner to further emulate a real video game. The colour palette has gotten simpler for the convenience of the audience. Again, actions must be relatively easy to follow throughout the images, so I limited colour variety to avoid overwhelming the player. In the lower two on the left, Depression’s tears glow. This is a reference to moths’ attraction to light/use of light for navigation. Depression acts like a landmark in their domain.

Loading Screens - Final:

The final loading screen features a level concept for ‘Melancholy.’ A relatively limited colour palette of blue, red and white are used to aid in both visual and tonal communication. The health bar was ditched and more space was provided to evoke a vast feeling in the audience. This is paired with recurring visuals of a skeleton and tree. The tree grows within the skeleton and emulates nerves and tendons to further push a rather unsettling tone. This loading screen is labeled ‘Skeletal Roots’ in the file provided above.

Guide Book: 

The ‘Melancholy’ guidebook is intended to provide information about the inspiration behind each character and some information about the real disorders behind them. This is to further develop the idea of providing access to some mental health resources that aren’t currently in reach to the majority of the world. The key source of information used for this book specifically is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which is used worldwide. Some pages from the DSM-5 were also used as background imagery for the guidebook (see Patient and Doctor spreads.) The application of the guidebook in real life would likely be as an encyclopedia to assist the players in techniques and skills to advance through the game.

 Each page of the guidebook is intended to display a character’s information and design. At first, I put fully rendered character illustrations on one side of the spread and information on the other. The text on these pages is very specific: the name, domain and visual inspiration of a character, their associated pages in the DSM-5, symptoms if they’re a disorder and synopsis if they’re a player, and methods/mechanisms for overcoming challenges. The disorders are more straightforward than the players, as there are multiple pages in the DSM-5 analysing symptoms and habits within these disorders.

On the later page spreads I messed around with the text more than anything. Having congestion on one page more than another ensured readers weren’t just consuming information the whole time. Quieter areas were the text would be in earlier spreads, I believe, give the audience a bit of a break from all the chaos and clutter in ‘Melancholy.’ Text manipulation, again, was the main goal for refinements. At first I just chopped up the text and scattered it in different areas to pad out the leftover space a little, but then started to hide the text within the characters’ environments, like in Anxiety’s tree branches and the roses in Narcissism garden. The integration helped to embed knowledge within the game rather than just present it, so a variation on ‘show don’t tell.’