B.L.O.B.

Building Lifelong Open Behaviors

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Inspiration

Breaking Taboo’s goal to destigmatize discussions surrounding mental health beckons for a solution which widespreadly and effectively reaches and educates people on mental health topics. Inspired by Poptropica, Finch, Duolingo, Dumb Ways to Die, and more, we aspired to design a web game for children to learn how to develop emotional awareness through interactive games and visual aids. Drawing from Breaking Taboo’s “Fuzzy Feelings” pamphlet, we developed our game to help children understand different emotional states and learn ways to process them simply yet effectively.

We decided to use blobs to represent these various emotions because we believe they aptly characterize the low-definition and amorphous way emotions can make us feel. It’s not always the easiest or clearest to pinpoint exactly how we’re feeling, and those feelings additionally can change shape quickly; however, we hope that this game shows that that’s okay and that we can learn to befriend our blobby feelings.

What it does

B.L.O.B. (Building Lifelong Open Behaviors) is an interactive multi-level web game targeted at children. Players venture through a sea of emotions and encounter cartoon blobs representing different feelings such as confusion, anger, fear, etc., and complete levels by picking an appropriate method to cope with the emotion each blob is dealing with. Infinite time and attempts to select a right answer creates a forgiving and non-stressful learning environment suitable for this age group, while simultaneously prompting the child to become more emotionally conscious and competent as they progress through the game; once they help a blob feel better by choosing a correct answer, the child and blob become friends :)

How we built it

  • Used HTML/CSS and Javascript for the frontend
  • Used Node.js, MongoDB, and Insomnia for the backend
  • Made a very large assortment of character designs, world designs, and other graphics in Figma

Challenges we ran into

A large challenge we faced in the ideating phase was deciding the type of storytelling we wanted to implement, determining to what extent players would change the “ending” of the game. We were hesitant to implement any sort of negative feedback into our gameplay because we wanted to keep it a feel-good and low-stress game, particularly in consideration of the target age group; however, we also didn’t want the game to be too static with the player’s input having no influence over the course of the game. We still wanted to educate children. Our first idea was to just display different ways to effectively respond to different emotions and have the player check a box for each one before moving onto the next emotion, but this came across too much as a learning module than a game, and we wanted to create something more engaging. We then thought about adding wrong choices that would essentially “quiz” the user and teach them to identify both effective and ineffective emotional habits, but we didn’t want a series of wrong answers to just lead to a despondent ending because we wanted to emphasize the learning process over having the right answers immediately.

After deliberating with each other and gaining insight from ACM Studio’s game design workshop, we established a basic set of game mechanics that incorporated both positive and negative feedback elements in suitable amounts. Our emphasis was still largely on the positive side, but we decided to keep wrong answer choices available and to simply prompt the user to try again until they picked a correct choice. We also decided to attach a relevant minigame to each blob character to bring out the interactive side of the game and make it more engaging for kids, while maintaining an overall relaxing aura. For example, in our demo, we have a fun little puzzle set up to represent how we can address confusion by leaning into our curiosity and our drive to seek answers to our questions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud that we were able to efficiently implement all of our initial project goals to ensure an enjoyable and engaging experience for our target audience. Through cohesive collaboration and persistence, we were able to successfully construct a colorful and interactive adventure/story-telling game intended to educate children on emotional health and well-being while also demonstrating collective growth and competence as emerging developers.

Specifically, we are proud of the message our application conveys to the younger generation as it highlights the importance of seeking healthy ways to understand, explore, and embrace our emotions. By incorporating fun visuals and interactive game-play, we hope to encourage users, especially children, to establish a healthy relationship with mental health education resources, normalize open discussion and emotional awareness, and fight the stigma that has prevented millions of people from seeking the help they need.

In a more technical sense, we are proud of the creative design aspect of our program. All of our characters, settings, and visuals were original designs created using Figma. The simplistic, cute, and family-friendly nature of the designs enabled us to build the world we envisioned from scratch that best suited both our and Breaking Taboo’s solution.

What we learned

  • It was one of our teammate’s first time working with HTML/CSS. She completed a crash course in 12 hours and implemented multiple of our pages!
  • Working with Figma to prototype our designs and create graphics
  • Implementing a login/signup backend that stores data in MongoDB
  • Principles of game design and mechanics in coming up with our educational game

What's next for B.L.O.B.

  • Extend B.L.O.B.’s functionality so that it can be launched for public and school use
  • Adding sound effects and background music for a more immersive game experience
  • Increase the number of levels in the game by adding more blobs and minigames
  • Further the impact of our children’s game by going beyond basic emotion blobs and including mental health conditions

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