DEVELOP VIDEO GAMES AS THERAPEUTIC MEDIA FOR DEPRESSION USING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT METHOD

Abstract

Depression is one of the most common mental sicknesses occurred currently, a person diagnosed with depression usually has an extreme emotional disturbance caused by great stress and anxiety that can lead the person to become suicidal over time Technology has evolved quite significantly over time, especially in multimedia, multimedia makes things easier and more practical to be delivered such as information and spreading messages to a large community in a short time. Video Games is one of the most popular multimedia categories, it gain a lot of popularity among people especially the younger generation, video games can help people to reduce stress and deal with anxiety to its player. In this research, the author designed a video game using one of the most popular game engines which is Unity with Research and Development method which refers to ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate). The game was a story-based game about depression and the feeling of being left alone. The output of this research is a short story-based 2D pixel art platformer game that was designed and coded using the Unity game engine. The development of this game is expected to help people deal with depression and help to spread awareness about mental health, especially depression to public people.