Chill Room: Pocket Edition

A mobile game that creates a personal space for self-regulation and emotional well-being for middle grade students. Demo available for iOS and Android.

Game splash art

Our Vision and Goals

Building Mindfulness Through Play

We built this mobile app for iOS and Android in partnership with Allegheny Health Network's Chill Project. Our mission is to equip middle school students with the tools they need to navigate their emotions and strengthen their ability to identify, discuss, and react to stress with resilience. Recognizing that access to traditional "Chill Rooms" and similar stress management programs in schools is not always available, we've designed a mobile app that brings some of the Chill Room's essential support resources directly to students, offering consistent access to strategies for managing stress and fostering self-awareness.

Transformational Goals

 
Knowledge: Players deepen their understanding of resilience, self-awareness, and effective coping mechanisms.
 
Experience: Players are guided to a digital "oasis" for a self-regulation break when it makes sense and is safe-enough to do so.
 
Behavior: We aim to shift players towards consistent practice of self-regulation skills when they are calm, when learning is possible and before they need those skills.

Barriers to Transformation

We recognize the challenges players face:

  • Access Limitations: Not all students have 24/7 access to supportive environments like Chill Rooms.
  • Ability & Motivation Gap: Skills require practice during calm moments, but students aren't always motivated to do so when not in distress.

Addressing Our Transformations And Barriers

Our game design intends to directly address these transformations and barriers:

  • Habit Formation: "Idle Game" mechanics encourage regular (and importantly short) check-ins, creating a low-barrier practice routine that is motivating without being endlessly addictive.
  • Compatible On Older Devices & Limited Internet: To address access barriers, our prototype runs smoothly on iOS and Android devices that are five or six years old and onward. The game only requires an internet connection to download, not to run.
  • Agency & Ownership: The customization aspects empower players to create their own personalized "digital oasis" where they feel safe to practice new skills. In this space, players take on the role of an expert helper rather than a learner.

The Gameplay Loop: How Play Creates Change

The game's loop embeds our transformational goals within the play of the game. The scope and sequence of the curriculum were determined in consultation with subject matter experts to focus on foundational emotional awareness skills.

Step 1: Check In & Collect

The player opens the app to their village. Through idle mechanics, structures have passively generated "Harvest," the game's currency. The player is immediately rewarded for returning by collecting these resources from buildings, surprise boxes, or interactive elements like butterflies.

Harvest check in
Tidbit sad

Step 2: Assess the Village

The player observes their villagers. Some are happy, but occasionally, a villager will be in a "bad mood," indicated by a cloud over their head. This state is a core part of the transformational design.

Transformation Moment: Motivating Player Return & Small Bites Of Practice

A villager in a bad mood stops generating Harvest, slowing the player's progress. This creates an intrinsic motivation to check in regularly and help villagers feel better. It directly supports the goal of forming a consistent check-in habit without being punitive.

Step 3: Interact & Learn

The player taps a villager to start a conversation. The learning design follows a structured two-phase approach. First, in Exposure phases, villagers introduce concepts (in the prototype, this is about naming & recognizing the feel of the six basic emotions) in low-stakes dialogues. Then, in Knowledge Check phases, players must apply that knowledge to help a villager, reinforcing learning through retrieval practice. Content reappears using a technique called Spaced Repetition shown to aid memory recall.

Transformation Moment: Declarative Knowledge

This structured sequence—presenting clear examples & moments for connecting to personal experience first, then testing understanding—is designed to efficiently build declarative knowledge (the 'what' and 'why') about emotional awareness. By taking on an "expert role" to help the villager, the player practices this knowledge across varied scenarios to support real-world transfer.

Dialog
Box breathing

Step 4: Practice a Skill

Certain dialogues trigger a rhythm-based deep breathing exercise. The player participates by tapping the screen in time with the visual cues, helping a villager calm down while practicing a tangible self-regulation skill themselves. Although deep breathing is the only "procedural skill" in the prototype, this same minigame can be expanded to show the steps of any self-regulation skill, such as color spotting, mindful walking, and other CBT skills that have multiple steps.

Transformation Moment: Procedural Knowledge

This is where "how-to" skills with steps that have to be acted out are taught. Instead of just reading about a technique like box breathing, the player watches a character perform the timing and steps while participating in a music-based minigame. This is intended to build procedural memory, making the skill easier to physically enact outside the game.

Step 5: Build & Grow

Using the collected "Harvest," the player buys new structures, upgrades existing ones, and personalizes their village. This tangible progress, and visible improvement and deepending of their relationships to villagers, are the rewards for their engagement and support.

Transformation Moment: Reinforcing the Cycle

Positive interactions and skill practice directly lead to more Harvest, which allows for village growth. This closes the loop by centering the intended player behavior with game progression, motivating the player to continue the cycle.

Building a structure

How Playtesting Shapes Our Design: Key Iterations

A prototype's true value is in what it teaches us. Through playtesting, we identify what isn't working and adapt our design to better serve our players and our transformational goals.

While we have made too many changes informed by playtesting to list them all here, below are three of the most recent key changes we're making based on direct player feedback.

1. Deepening Curriculum Engagement

The Observation: We saw that players, while enjoying the swipe mechanic, often chose answers randomly without deeply engaging with the curriculum content in dialogues.

Our Insight: The format--in which answers were hidden and required swiping left and right to reference them, and some of the dialogue did not have reward stakes while other dialogue did-- was encouraging guessing over learning. We needed to introduce concepts more gently and make the choice interface more deliberate.

Our Iterations:

  • Introducing "Sensitizing Exposure": Concepts are now introduced organically in low-stakes conversations that connect the skill to the player's own life (e.g., "When you get stressed, do you ever feel shaky?"). This primes the player for later learning.
  • Redesigning the Response Interface: While the feel of swiping was popular, it created cognitive load. We are redesigning the interface to be more intuitive, allowing players to easily compare options and make more thoughtful choices.

2. Balancing Economy with Relationships

The Observation: Our idle economic loop was highly effective—so much so that it sometimes overshadowed the character relationships and dialog we wanted to foster. Players focused more on collecting than connecting and reflecting.

Our Insight: The two core systems—economy and relationships—were intertwined in a way that was invisible to the player. Players needed to see that relationships and game dialog were essential to progress. 

Our Iterations:

  • Raising the Stakes: Dialogue choices now have a greater and more visible impact on villager moods, encouraging players to attend more closely to the content.
  • Improving Feedback: We added a clearer tutorial and more visible UI elements to show how helping a villager immediately improves the relationship and contributes to progress. We improved the UI that communicates the current Relationship level.
  • Improving Dialog: Character dialog will be rewritten to make the deepening relationship arc with the player more apparent.
Relationship level diagram

3. From Practice to Understanding

The Observation: Players could successfully complete the rhythm minigame but struggled to articulate the steps of the skill they had just performed.

Our Insight: The procedural knowledge (the 'how') wasn't translating into declarative knowledge (the 'what' and 'why'). We needed a bridge between doing and understanding.

Our Iterations:

  • Enhancing Visuals: We are adding a more humanoid character to perform the exercises alongside the villager for clearer demonstration and making the character animations larger.
  • Adding a Reflection Phase: After the minigame, a new dialogue prompt will ask the player to reflect on the skill (e.g., "What did you notice?"), helping to turn procedural knowledge into something players can articulate out loud.
  • We will need further testing to validate that these changes are having the impact we want.
minigame sketch

Foundational Research & Key Insights

Our design is grounded in established research on educational games, habit formation, and self-regulation. The following insights were critical in shaping our core mechanics and transformational goals.

Idle Mechanics for Habit Formation

To encourage the consistent, low-stress practice needed for skill-building, we adopted "idle" or "clicker" game mechanics. Research shows these systems are highly effective at motivating players to return for short, regular sessions, which is ideal for learning and habit formation.

Alexandrovsky, et al. (2019)

Embedded Design for Engagement

Games that are explicitly "for learning" can be less effective. We followed the principle of "embedded design," intermixing curriculum content with off-topic conversations and activities. This makes the learning feel more natural and intrinsically motivated.

Kaufman & Flanagan (2015)

The Power of Playing the Expert

Games allow players to try on new identities. By casting the player as an "expert" caretaker who helps villagers, we empower them to identify as someone skilled in self-regulation, which can shift their own self-perception and confidence.

Lee & Hammer (2011)

Learning by Watching (Vicarious Learning)

Watching game characters model skills can be a powerful teaching tool. Our rhythm mini-games, where villagers demonstrate breathing exercises, are based on research showing that observing and then mimicking behavior is highly effective for skill acquisition.

Nørlev, et al. (2022)

What We've Completed

Phase 1: Functional Prototype

Our focus in Phase 1 has been on building a functional, research-ready prototype that showcases the core gameplay loop and supports our transformational goals. Key deliverables include:

  • A Playable Prototype: A stable, interactive version demonstrating core mechanics like villager interaction, "Harvest" collection, and customization.
  • Comprehensive Design & Technical Documentation: Outlining our process, research, and instructions for testing.

Future Directions

Building on our foundational prototype, we envision several key areas for expansion. These future directions are designed to validate or modify the way the prototype teaches content, expand its content from 5 days to a full game, and continue to validate its effectiveness as a tool for emotional well-being.

Research

1. Rigorous Research Deployment

Our top priority for future phases is to use the 5-day demo to conduct formal research to validate the game's impact and make changes as needed. This includes testing for immediate teaching as well as running longitudinal studies to measure long-term knowledge retention and real-world transfer. We were careful in the prototyping phase to set up a functioning data collection backend so that we could collect telemetry / quantitative data in the next phase to complement qualitative data.

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2. Expand For Younger & Older Grades

Once our demo has been validated for impact, expand content for younger grades by creating simpler characters and language. Expand game for older grades by removing some simpler concepts and including opt-in concepts and content more suitable for high schoolers.  

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3. Add Content + Characters

Expand the demo to a full CBT curriculum's worth of content and months, rather than days, of gameplay. Design and expand items and characters based on the existing five sample aesthetics in the demo. Expand so that all players can tailor their world to their own taste and aesthetic. No two villages need to look the same for our concepts to teach students.

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4. More Support for Big (Non-Emergency) Feelings

Players already begin the demo with an emotions check-in. While we have support and language for crisis, playtesting feedback showed us that players want the characters they've formed relationships with to offer support and acknowledgement in low times, even when it's not an emergency.

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5. Customizable Villagers and Buildings

Expand both the game economy and sense of a space players have designed themselves by offering additional upgrade options for specific buildings and villagers.