GameDev Breakdown

Christopher Arnold of Crowned Daemon Studios calls in to talk about the studio's mental health-focused game, Syntherapy, the inspiration behind its development, and its reception in the community. Crowned Daemon Studios wants to guide you through an exploration of therapy and mental health issues unique from just about any other. Its visual novel adventure game, Syntherapy, places you (a therapist) in charge of the diagnosis and treatment of an artificial intelligence in a story with over 30 possible endings. This is not your average visual novel; Crowned Daemon leveraged publisher support to put together a fully voice-acted experience, and the sense of dramatic immersion is real. While you'll interact with an artificial patient in the game, the story's influence is both real and personal. "A lot of it's just personal history," says Arnold. "This actually started as sort of a cathartic exercise of sort of externalizing thoughts and feelings and things that I was trying to figure out in a format where I could