I wanted to make a game about mental health that wasn't too heavy

Steam post image Plodding Recovery is an adventure game about a protagonist carrying a mental health struggle, moving forward just a little at a time 🐾 In this post I'd like to share the things I cared about most while making it.

1. As little misery as possible

Saying "as little misery as possible" about a game dealing with mental health might sound a bit odd. The premise is that the protagonist is someone struggling with his mental health, so there's no escaping the weight of that. Even so, from the very start of development, this was the one thing I wanted to hold onto firmly.

Steam post image In other words: the theme itself is heavy, but I kept thinking — surely I don't have to steer the story toward sicker, bleaker places? Taking revenge on society. Being betrayed by a trusted friend right as you start to recover. An overdose… Writing those turns felt wrong to me. Because if someone who is having a hard time right now goes to the trouble of picking up this game, and playing it only leaves them worse off, something about that seems off.

I don't for a moment believe my game will lead to anyone's recovery. If anything, playing it won't make your heart any lighter, and nothing particularly good will happen in your life. But the story is in my hands as the author, and deliberately steering it somewhere bleaker felt like treating mental health as "material" for making a game more exciting. I didn't want to do that. As someone who was once in a hard place myself, I wanted to make this game with my own kind of prayer in it. So that's what I did.

2. No romance

The protagonist is male and there are female characters, but there is no romance.

Can you enjoy romance when your heart is having a hard time? Are you even likely to come across the opportunity in the first place? I'm fairly skeptical on both counts. Good encounters may well happen at times like that, but I think anyone they happen to is very lucky indeed. So for a game about mental health, romance didn't feel like the main thread, and I left it out. The protagonist talks with the female characters many times, but what's being drawn there is much closer to friendship.

3. As pop as possible

This is close to the first point: precisely because the theme is a dark one, I wanted as many pop elements in it as I could manage.

Steam post image Simple, slightly cute pixel art for the character design. I loved the Power Pro Kun Pocket series as a kid, so I drew the faces of all seven characters, protagonist included, with its character design as my reference. The dialogue, too — not too dark. When you're truly at your worst, the only words that come out are "this is awful, I can't," but that doesn't make a game. It also drags the whole mood down, so I wrote lines aiming for "dark but pop" as much as I could. That said, the theme is what it is, so if you asked me whether it turned out to be a fully pop game, no. There are plainly dark scenes in it. It isn't perfect, but I figured that if I could make a game about mental health that isn't too heavy, it would be less of a chore to play. That was the thinking behind it. (And making a game about mental health that somehow isn't all that heavy became a rather fun goal for me in itself.)

Wrapping up

Those were my three guiding principles in making Plodding Recovery. It releases on August 19th, so if it caught your interest, I'd be grateful if you added it to your wishlist 😊 Thank you for reading this far 💚 ▼ The Steam page is here! Plodding Recovery

One more note

On the first point: of course, bleak stories do save people sometimes. There are as many tastes in stories — and as many personal histories behind those tastes — as there are people, so bleak turns aren't a bad thing at all. This was simply a question of what happens when I make a game dealing with mental health, so these were the principles I went with 😺