Journey Within - Designing a 2D side scrolling game to foster emotional resilience
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Building and prototyping game interactions in Godot Engine
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Team
Independent project
Timeline
Dec 2024 (3 weeks)
Skills
Tools
Adobe illustrator, Godot, Keynote
Timeline
6 weeks in Taiwan (jun 2024-jul 2024)
Tools
Figma, Miro, Whimsical, Microsoft suite
Skills
Market Research & Analysis, User Research, Journey Mapping, UI/UX, Visual Design, Wireframing, rapid prototyping, Service Blueprint
Team
Bhavani, Samantha, Vanessa, Martin Thaler (supervising faculty), FEG DRIVE mentors
Role
Design Strategy & UI/UX Intern
Client
FarEastone - One of Taiwan’s largest Telecom company
Partner - FarEastern Group (Taiwan’s largest conglomerate)
From Idea to Direction
Journey Within is a 2D side-scrolling platformer game where players help Ember, the protagonist, restore balance to her emotions. Through surreal and neuron like landscape inspired by human mind, players tackle the terrain and enemy challenges representing emotions like anxiety, envy, nostalgia, boredom and embarrassment.
The Intent
I set out to design and prototype a 2D side-scrolling game in Godot to explore how interactive systems can help people understand complex emotions.
Secondary emotions such as anxiety and embarrassment etc are often perceived negatively. Yet they serve protective and social functions. I wanted to reframe them not as weaknesses, but as adaptive signals.
How might I design a game that help players understand the positive role of the secondary emotions and learn to overcome it?
Game Overview
The game addresses the need for secondary emotional understanding and resilience.
It presents a playful, engaging way to reframe emotions as tools for growth instead of obstacles.
Target Audience
Designed for teens and adults who are interested in seeking an imaginative and reflective gameplay experience.
Inspiration
The game idea was inspired by the emotional depth portrayed in
Inside Out 2
Process
Story writing
Story writing
Concept development
Concept development
Character designing
Character designing
Translating inspiration into a playable vision
Here, the emotional theme was shaped into a cohesive world, narrative arc, and character system that aligned with the intended gameplay experience.
Idea creation
Idea creation
Playing other games
Playing other games
Learning Godot tool
Grounding the idea through exploration and research
This phase I focused on identifying the emotional direction of the game, studying existing mechanics, and familiarizing yourself with the engine constraints and possibilities.
Godot prototyping
Godot prototyping
Bringing the concept to life
In this stage, I mapped the relationships between the player actions and the environmental triggers using the spider diagram. Later the mechanics were built in gadot to ensure playable interaction.
Godot prototyping
Godot prototyping
Playtesting
Refining the experience
Finally, I conducted playtesting to help validate whether the mechanics felt intuitive and emotionally legible by observing how the players interacted with the game.
Coding
Coding in Godot (GDScript) helped bridge design ideas and playable interactions
PRIMARY GAMEPLAY
• Platforming Challenges: Run, jump, avoid toxin spikes and navigate neuron-inspired challenging terrain/platforms across each emotional realms.
• Emotion-Based Abilities: Unlock and use abilities tied to emotions, like the “Deep Breath Blow” in the Level 1- Whirlscape Realm (representing anxiety emotion in its fearest form) to kill the enemy and proceed.
• Memory Orb Collection: Collect glowing orbs that represent positive emotional memories to gain energy to advance the level and fight with enemy to restore balance.
PLAYABLE VISION
Storyboarding the narrative and scene progression provided the clarity needed to design meaningful interactions before prototyping.
By visualizing the story and scene flow first, I was able to define how player behavior, environment responses, and game mechanics should interact before implementing them in the godot engine. Storyboard also helped in receiving the feedback to make sure that look and feel reflected that of a mind.
For every frame, I decided to focus on 3 main criterias:
Identifying the main theme or message
Defining player's objective
Determining the key emotional moments
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
To begin with the concept development, the challenge was clearly defining the story arc and scene progression to ensure emotional states translated coherently into gameplay.
How did I Address the Challenge?
Wrote the complete narrative to establish emotional intent and flow
Sketched storyboards to visualize scene progression and player experience
Created a spider diagram mapping scenes, interactions, and input triggers
Designing emotions as gameplay systems with AI accelerating character ideation
ASSET CREATION
Achieved a 2x faster asset creation workflow through rapid exploration of visual styles using generative AI prompting.
Illustrator’s generative AI prompting was used to rapidly explore and generate game character assets and sprites. Through 3 versions of iterative prompts, variations of expressions, poses, and visual styles were created and refined.
Learnings & Reflections
AI to Accelerate Creative Exploration
Through using Illustrator’s generative AI, I learned that effective prompt engineering relies heavily on precise use of language to guide visual outcomes.
Building Through Rapid Iteration
As a beginner in coding, I used tutorials and iterative experimentation to translate design ideas into working gameplay mechanics in Godot.
Bridging Design with Technical Logic
While ChatGPT helped generate code snippets, the real learning came from understanding the logic and integrating it into the right functions to make gameplay systems work.