First draft:https://codepen.io/Haya-Mohamed-Ibrahim/pen/LENjBRX

Final Draft:https://sensational-blini-1dbe3c.netlify.app/

Final Game Reflection: by Haya Mohamed and Farah Essam

For our final project, we created an interactive narrative attachment styles game with two pathway. One focused on a family context and the other on a relationship context. The first pathway places the player inside realistic family scenarios, where they face situations with family members and have different choices for how to react, and the other pathway places the player in emotional situations with their romantic partner. Their responses in each reveal patterns connected to attachment styles such as secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. We chose these two pathways so the player can get a fuller picture in more than one context. The goal of the game is not to judge the player, but to help the player self-reflect on how they emotionally respond within different situations. Each choice leads to gentle feedback and ultimately a dominant attachment style result with a breakdown of the player’s patterns. Studying psychology made me realize that attachment styles are a very important aspect of one’s personality that is built from childhood and can change and affect all stages of life. That is why we chose this topic, since it can help players understand themselves and their emotional patterns more.

In the first draft of the game, the structure was more basic. There was only one pathway with 10 scenarios in a relationship context. After receiving feedback during development, we made several important changes. First, we edited the relationship pathway to have more depth, then we added the other pathway (family context) as the doctor recommended. We made sure the game’s font and colors are accessible to people with color blindness and low vision. We also made the feedback clearer, showing which attachment style each choice leans toward and providing a brief explanation of why. We improved the interface by combining the two pathways so someone can choose the pathway they want, and when they finish, they can go back and try the other one if they like. We also learned how to actually create an accessible neat link which took us some time but was worth it.

If we had more time, we would have expanded the scenarios, made the game more detailed, or created scenarios that branch out from each answer, so it would generate more and different paths based on the player’s choices. We might have included more complex emotional situations so players could explore their attachment styles on a deeper level. We think that, with more time, we could have interviewed people and asked them about situations where they questioned or reflected on their attachment styles and added those scenarios to our game with context. We could have also made the game feel more visually engaging and even interviewed a professor in the field of psychology to gain more insights.

This game taught us a lot more than we expected at the beginning, both on a technical and personal level. We learned how to actually make AI generate a game using a script and customize the whole game to fit the storyline or scenarios. Even though we didn’t build the entire code from scratch, we tried to figure out how to make it work and how to make it a playable game at the end by changing the script to fix issues, adjust the colors used, and arrange how the choices are presented. It was our first time handling something like that, so actually making it work at the end was impressive to us.

On a personal level, making the scenarios about the family and relationship attachment styles made us reflect on our own attachment patterns too. We started noticing which reactions we relate to the most which ones feel uncomfortable and which ones we experience more often. We basically gained a lot of insights about the actual styles through thorough research.

Below you will find sources we use for understanding and generating this game my understanding of attachment styles was developed through Psychology lectures and our personal observations on family dynamics.

Cindy Hazan & Phillip R. Shaver, “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511‑524. DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511

A helpful overview on attachment theory: “John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory” on SimplyPsychology: https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html