Why Men Need Mental Health Awareness
Welcome to the second developer diary of The Space in Between, an emotional dating sim about Asian-American identity, mental health, and stargazing. As we’re wrapping up development, I wanted to give some insight into our game as well as our usual updates.
While both of our characters, June and Miles, have issues with their mental health, we focused Miles’ story on his battle with depression and him taking time off college to deal with his mental health. I didn’t think anything of the fact that the male character’s arc is focused on mental illness until our game was mentioned in CampbellNotes’s article “Gaming and mental health have a long way to go”, which featured Gamespot’s stream “The Men’s Mental Health Forum.” As someone who has personally dealt with and dated men who have depression, I never considered mental health a gendered issue in our game. Upon further inspection of the gaming industry as a whole though, I realized just how many games promote a macho hero. When I ask my non-gamer friends to list off the most famous games, those works rarely have emotional sensitivity.
Similar to how June is Chinese but her story is not defined by the word “Asian,” Miles’ depression is only apart of who he is. Our game does not even acknowledge the social stigma of men who have a mental illness, and I hope our players forget the fact that he’s a guy openly talking about depression.
Another aspect of our game I wanted to address is the title: Why are we The Space in Between? The phrase is not mentioned once in our game, so what gives? I gave a hint in this tweet, but to fully out myself for the embarrassment I am: I love to self-insert myself in every creative work I touch. While Miles does not represent a particular person in my life, parts of him are taken from past men I’ve dated, and it does not take a rocket scientist to see June’s similarity to me, someone who has a complicated relationship with her mother. My first love’s favorite movie is Before Sunset, and there’s this line that goes: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.” As die-hard romantics, we saw ourselves in this manner, two individuals trying to find the magic in the space between us two.
Although we are no longer together, with each new guy I open myself up to, with each new person I meet, I am perpetually closing the space in between us. I am making the attempt. This stargazing trip that June and Miles embark on is their space in between. For, “a broken heart is an open heart” (Jandy Nelson).
In other news, we launched the first part of an 8 episode comic, Searching in Between! We haven’t teased this much, but June’s sarcastic humor — no matter if she’s talking about hating herself or seducing bears — is drenched in our game. We wanted to create something that showed off her spunky behavior, so we came up with a comic that serves as a prequel to our game. Searching in Between is a slice-of-life comic about June’s many unfortunate attempts to find a boyfriend before meeting Miles, written by me and illustrated by Ray. Every Wednesday, we will release a new episode on our Twitter!
As we are aiming for a January 2021 release, we’ll be amping up our Twitter presence for the new couple of months. With our release, we will (maybe?) release some merch, put up our soundtrack on SoundCloud, and do a giveaway (Tweet us ideas if you have any!). In the meantime, you can wishlist our free game on Steam.