How my video game project is helping me learn tech and conquer my mental health
12-28, 13:00–14:25 (Europe/Berlin), HIP - Track 2 - Room 2
Language: English

A few years ago I came up with an idea to help myself that would later develop into a video game project. It has taught me more than I would have expected so far and I would really like to share those things with you!

DISCLAIMER: This talk may touch on some triggering topics. We will give a heads up before mentioning them within the talk so you can choose to leave the room or put some headphones on temporarily. We hope this works for you!


I always liked coming up with creative stories. It was fun to create characters and have them experience interesting stories.
Not surprisingly when I was a teenager and life threw mental health issues at me, I decided to deal with it in a creative way, so I made a character and made him go through some stuff. A short time later, I had a handful of characters and idea: How about I make a video game out of this? How about I make it about hackers?
A few years and a few semesters of video game art studies later I am here with a project that so far has helped me with those mental health issues, taught me a lot about video games and has gotten me more into technology and I now have a small team of friends who are helping me. The plan for the project is to have a video game about hackers that is part story based (and your interactions with the characters influence this part) and part CTFs. I have gotten lucky and found a few friends to be willing to help with this project including Dario, who will be giving the talk with me! We want to release it for free and make everything open source.
I hope that our journey (so far) can teach you some cool stuff as well!
-yvmqznrm

Just so you know: The video game is still in development, so we will not be able to show a fully finished game during this talk, but we will do what we can to be able to show a small demo!

I am a trans dude in my early twenties who makes video games in college and art and likes to learn all sorts of cool things about tech :)

I'm a EEE student, and I'm really interested in electronics, and both the hardware and software level of computing, although I'm a complete novice.