HANNAH ANASTASI
Resilience Hero: Visual Novel
You are a young person who has just arrived in Frogsmouth: a fictional town on the coast of Cornwall. Armed with the Resilience Framework and aided by your talking dog, you spend a year making new friends, rising to meet new challenges and discovering your personal strengths as you become the ultimate Resilience Hero!
Resilience Hero is an Edutainment Visual Novel created for the Mental Health organisation Boingboing and Cornwall Council. I worked as Project Lead, overseeing the design, art direction and created the character art.
The game was built in Unity and intended to run on desktop browsers.
Purpose
Resilience Hero is a multiple choice questionnaire, inspired by Boingboing's Resilience Framework - a set of 42 tips that can help to build mental resilience. When presented a question, the player must select the most "resilient-building" answer to score the highest points and progress the story.
The intended audience is 10-16 year olds, particularly those who may be suffering from anxiety, depression or other mental health-related difficulties that may be impeding their ability to function in school, other other social situations.
Our aim was to create an interactive experience that could deliver the values of the Resilience Framework to those that need it in an easy-to-digest, comforting and amusing way that could be used independently, or co-optatively.
Design
After my initial pitch was approved by Cornwall Council, my first task was to work out how to structure the game progression around the Resilience Framework. Having an event or question for each Resilient Move would have been excessive, so I instead decided to write 3 questions for each stage, with the stages named after the 5 Pillars of the Resilience Framework: Basics, Belonging, Learning, Coping and Core Self.
The questions would be in-keeping with the theme of each stage and the player would be able to access an in-game version of the Resilience Framework - given to them by their pet dog at the start of the game - in case they needed some assistance when answering.
My partner-in-crime Luke Anastasi worked as programmer, adapting Fungus to manage the branching dialogue system. He also wrote the script, as well as designed and implemented the UI. After I drafted up the background layouts, we were lucky enough to have background Artist Jack Staples jump onboard to handle the final painted versions. Visually, we took a lot of inspiration from popular brands like Professor Layton and Pokemon and tied everything together with a paper craft/cut-out aesthetic across all the assets.
Once the art was finished and Luke was left to finish code in-between his day job, I turned my attention to writing an extensive Game Guide for Educators and Parents, and a printable booklet for young people containing the in-game descriptions of each resilient move. I also produced a range of printable activities to compliment the online experience:
Animator | Director | Multimedia Artist
HANNAH ANASTASI