{{page>Templates:video_games}} Distress Beacon is a work in progress (but mostly procrastinated) prototype about depression, mental health and suicide. I explained it to an acquaintance of mine like this:\\ Essentially, it drops you into the shoes of a character who one day, without explanation or warning wakes up in a black and while world. it's the same world he used to live in, but it's all black and white now. You play that character and you start engaging in that character's routine, or at least you try to, but you quickly find out that it's a terrible world you are in. for example, you go to school and you realize that instead of actually learning anything as that character, everything you do there is to actually run circles around your chair in the classroom. like, actually. if you take too long to make a lap around your chair, you get shit on. if you take a wide berth around the chair, you get shit on. if you go too fast around the chair, you get shit on by your friends who accuse you of trying to showboast. all this affects your "Happiness" meter, which goes up and down depending on what things happen to you. you get shit on by your friends for trying to hard in school? that loses you happiness. you get shit on by your teachers for not trying hard enough? you lose happiness. you walk between places and happen to get a random event where you stumble over a stone? it reduces your happiness. you come home and find your parents in an argument? your happiness decreases.\\ initially you are being dangled the hope that there is a way out of this world, back into the light, or the color. there are tales of secret doors into a better world, so you follow the questline and make successes, increasing your happiness value until you reach the end of the quest and have your happiness taken away again and then some when you find out that this door doesn't exist. that finding a way out of your situation isn't as easy as just going through a door eventually you realize that when you get lucky and find a character in the world who loves you, that improves your happiness and also helps you get through the day. the game now skips the minutes of walking around the chair for you, in fact it skips entire days for you while increasing your happiness, until one day that illusion is shattered, the relationship ends and your happiness meter gets devastated.\\ the game is called "Distress Beacon", and that is because every day the player is meant to walk to, well, a distress beacon, where every once in a while people or things will show up that will try to help you. most of the time the people that show up and the advice they give you is useless shit, just like in the real world ("just smile more"), but sometimes there will be things that you think might actually be useful. You will be given the address of a psychotherapist to which you then go in the hopes that it helps, and it will help initially, buuut.... eh.\\ The whole game focuses on the idea that all you need to do is to make it to the end of your school education. once you pass your final exam you will have your degree and can just go work, until then the game will continually remind you every day of the exact number of days remaining until that day comes, and your goal is to balance going to school and running laps around the chair with 1) your boredom and 2) finding ways of preventing your happiness from going too low, or perhaps getting out of this situation at all. so, at some point you will, for example, find a phone, which will help you get through school classes more easily but will also give you trouble with the school and inherently decreases your happiness because, well, social media, or isolation, or whatever it is that your phone does to you that makes you unhappy.\\ You will go through ups and downs but you will eventually realize that this is pointless and that you're not going to make you. you remember that at the very beginning of the game, you are told that you can always end it. you can always win the game by just killing yourself. in fact it's one of the first things you will read after the opening screen. so now you try it, but now you are in fact not unhappy enough to do it. at this point your objective changes, instead of trying really hard to maintain your happiness and making it in school, you try to find ways to kill yourself. you can't deliberately go out of your way to get yourself into situations that hurt your happiness a lot, but you can find suicide methods that allow you to do it with less unhappiness than some of the other methods require.\\ Eventually you're gonna find something that you can do, and when you finally manage to pull it off, the screen turns black and reads "You Win!". But when you click the continue button the screen turns black again and it will give you a reanimation sequence showing doctors trying their best to save your life. There's a chance they succeed, there's a chance they don't, but the first time around they usually will. You then respawn in a hospital and for the first time since you've been playing the game, you see colors again, the world is bright and peaceful, you can watch outside the window of the hospital and it's really quite serene. Your happiness is reset, you're still quite traumatized, etc., and after talking to the other patients in the hospital the game will eventually throw you back into the world again, where you can keep going.\\ \\ I had many more ideas for the game, but I will leave it at that for now.