Devlog 0: I Should've Started This Sooner

I suppose based on my timing, this is more of a post-mortem than a genuine devlog, but alas...

This quick game sketch was created for my Digital Games grad course. Our assignment was to create a short, playable, game to represent a personal experience. I pretty quickly decided to base my game around my efforts to quit smoking back in 2020. Anyone who has experienced the trials of attempting to quit smoking can likely attest to its difficulty. The nicotine withdrawal sucks, but for me, the hardest part was getting over the habit itself. Before class, during breaks, after work, all of these were good opportunities to have a cigarette or two, temporarily distancing from otherwise stressful environments. It became a "reward" in a sense for enduring social anxiety. My efforts to quit were greatly aided by the pandemic lockdown (yay?), as there was little need to satisfy that desire for "reward." Trying to quit before the pandemic was quite difficult. The body goes through harsh withdrawal symptoms, the mind seeks to alleviate these symptoms by justifying another smoke. I can't quit till I finish this pack. This will be my last smoke. This has been a tough week, I can justify having another. I decided to use these internal dialogues to form the basis of the game itself.

I had initially planned to make a top-down RPG that would prompt a message asking the player if they'd like to have a smoke, the messages becoming increasingly persuasive and frequent every time the player declines. This was initially going to be connected to a step counter but didn't quite feel right. The player could simply stand in place to avoid the prompts; from my experience, standing still should make the prompts worse. I eventually settled on a timer system. Choosing to smoke would make the timer reset to a fixed value (5 seconds for the sake of testing and prototyping). Choosing to deny the desire reduces the time between messages by 1 second, down to a minimum of 1 second. This was done to represent the mounting difficulty to "silence" the urge to smoke, which increases the longer one goes without. For the sake of implementing an ending to the game loop, after the player declines to smoke a predetermined number of times (again 5 for the sake of testing), the desire to smoke slowly declines and the frequency of the prompts goes down. After increasing the frequency of the prompts to 10 seconds (for testing), the game ends and congratulates the player for their restraint. This is perhaps the most unrealistic part of the experience, but was added for the sake of having a conclusion.

An alternate design that proved a bit too difficult to implement was the establishment of a second timer, providing the player with a "break time" during which they need to refrain from smoking. In this design, the player could choose to smoke or not. Smoking would silence the prompts for a percentage of the total break time, while refraining would continue to provide frequent prompts. Were this game to be expanded upon further, I would implement a health bar-like "stress" bar and a basic RPG-style encounter system. The player would confront potentially stressful experiences and their responses would either increase or decrease their stress bar. A full stress bar would worsen the withdrawal and increase the frequency of prompts. Choosing to smoke would reduce the stress bar, but reverse some of the player's progress towards reducing dependency (and reset withdrawal symptoms). The player could be subject to different level environments, such as work, classrooms, public transportation, etc., transitioning from one to the next and provided with short timed "breaks" where they can choose to either reduce stress (by smoking) or reduce withdrawal (by abstaining repeatedly). A game of this scope would effectively appear as a Life Sim-RPG, similar to games like Stardew Valley or the Shenmue series, but significantly smaller and more focused around this primary addiction mechanic.

While I am by no means an addiction expert, if other addictions do in fact mirror the patterns of smoking addiction, this system could be further expanded and reworked to include other substances and behaviours such as alcoholism, opioids, sex addiction, or even excessive social media consumption. An overwhelming number of people globally suffer from an addiction of some kind (stats and citations to be provided), yet I haven't encountered a game that allows the player to experience what addiction is like. By drawing attention to the experience of addiction itself, my hope is to encourage support and empathy for those who experience it, rather than the alienation and stigmatization often associated.