My Friend John

Story

You have trouble dealing with stress and anxiety. You worry your friends will stop reaching out because you can't always engage. The messages are constant and its hard to separate your thoughts in your head. Manage your stress and friends opinions of you.

Controls

Left Click - Select thoughts

Extras (Some spoilers)

The main mechanics for this game is your anxiety/stress and characters opinions. Your anxiety is tracked by the network icon on the phone. I liked the analogy of a phones network of how connected you were to how high levels of stress/anxiety can cause you to retreat and disconnect.

Each character starts at a certain opinion level of you and your choices (or lack of choosing) will sway their opinion (and your stress) in different ways. I wanted to explore someone who struggles to engage with others and the effects on themselves / those other people. Each character in my mind was supposed to sort of represent different "levels" of relationships.

John - He is your online friend who you've played games online with for years. While you've never met in person they are someone who really cares about you and values the friendship you have and wants to always engage. The idea with this is he's someone you've known for a while and has seen your anxiety grow over the years and doesn't want you to go to deep into that hole. Interactions with him are a bit more on the positive side for stress levels and his opinion of you starts high and doesn't really sway.

Chris - He is your co-worker, while you aren't really friends he is the type of person who reaches out often to start but will slow down as time goes on, never really dropping you entirely but always keeps the door open for you to return. He does have some conversations when you have low opinion / high opinion. His conversations are usually even on opinion / stress sway. The idea for him was to be kind of a medium amount of stress to start but he can transition to a friend and provide some relief.

Sarah - She is your sister. She doesn't really like you and is more of a I have to talk to you because your family. She is very conceited and expects you to do whatever she wants. If I had more time I wanted to explore this character as that family member who tries to take advantage of you solely based on being family. She is a large amount of stress and her opinion swings wildly.

Matt - He is an old high school friend. This character came from a bit of an amalgamation of people who I went to high school with. They are the type of person who are "friends" but they don't really care. All of his conversations is just asking you to do something with him, they are never really personal and it never really matters if you are there. He is also the type of person to just quickly cut all contact with someone if they aren't always up for doing what they want.

There are 5 different endings that depending on your stress levels and the balance of characters opinions.

I intentionally left the opinions hidden and what the options were actually doing because I wanted it to feel like dealing with an actual person. I was hoping that I could allude to their opinions with the responses and conversations that follow but this was really my first time working with dialogue and I found I'm not that good at it.

Thank you for playing!