Me The Game

A single-player card game about life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Manage your energy, health, and relationships one turn at a time

Why I Made This

Its always been hard to explain or share what my life is like to others. It's not just being tired, Its not just the physical pain or the mental fog It's also knowing that doing too much today means paying for it tomorrow. It's choosing between a shower or cooking dinner because you might not have the energy for both because the cost you will pay tomorrow is too steep

I wanted to make something that could show people what its like to manage all of these things moment to moment. Not just for healthy people to have understanding but also as a way to help newly disabled people have a different perspective and learn from my experience without reading a book or a blog post that wont really capture the true feelings and nuances

How It Plays

Each turn represents a day. You draw cards, decide how to spend your energy, deal with obligations and face whatever life throws at you, Then go to bed hoping You get enough sleep to do it all again the next day.

You have a hand of cards and a toolbox. The toolbox is where you play persistent cards that represent your habits, routines and coping mechanisms you've built into your life. Some cards have higher costs or rewards than others So the trick is figuring out which ones to play, which ones to hold onto, and what to let go of.

There are also four basic actions always available things like watching TV, taking a nap, cooking, or ordering takeout for when your hand doesn't have what you need or you're too low on energy to do much else.

The Five Stats

You're juggling five things at once:

• •Mental Health
• •Physical Health
• •Social Health
• •Energy
• •Money

Your score at the end is your lowest health stat. It doesn't matter how great your social life is if your body is falling apart. The game forces you to keep everything above water at the same time.

The Crash

When you spend energy on activities, some of them quietly add dice to a hidden pool. At the start of your next turn, those dice are rolled and the total is subtracted from your energy before you do anything else.

This is to represent post-exertional malaise — the delayed crash that makes CFS so unpredictable. One of the many challenges of this disorder is that you cant always feel what your spending. You think your doing well and stay another hour at that party but really you needed to go home even earlier. You feel fine when you leave and have a nice little wind down time at home after then it suddenly hits you. Maybe While your getting ready for bed or possibly the next morning it all catches up to you and hits like a brick. Most energy is not a coin to spend but rather a loan against the future and you body will "break your legs" to get what its owed.

if your energy drops below zero, you crash. A crash means symptoms are increased and ability to function is on the decline, you lose points across multiple stats and are forced to drop things from your routine as you scramble to stabilize.

Crashes cascade. One bad day becomes a bad week if you're not careful. This is the core tension of the game. You always want to do more than you safely can. The game shows you that pacing is more productive than pushing through.

The Cards

There are six types of cards:

• •Activities — Quick things you do and move on. Immediate effects, then they're gone.
• •Hobbies — Things you build into your routine. They sit in your toolbox and can be used each day at will.
• •Relationships — The people in your life! Different types have different values and some are an obligation that you must to maintain
• •Obligations — Things you have to deal with whether you want to or not. Bills, appointments, responsibilities. Skip them and there are consequences.
• •Upgrades — Improvements you attach to cards already in your routine to make them better and sometimes more demanding.
• •Events —Events are the things you cant plan or predict. A pet emergency, Last min party invites, Family dinner. Decide if its worth the cost/risk after you've spent on everything you already planned. Day to day you decide if you should save energy in case something comes up or if you should spend every last drop leaving you more fulfilled but unprepared for lifes surprises.

The World Reflects How You're Doing

The background behind the game shifts based on your stats. Your energy determines the time of day — high energy and the sun is out, low energy and the sky goes dark. Your mental health controls the weather — clear skies when things are good, storm clouds when they're not. Your physical health shapes the landscape, and your social health affects how vivid or washed out everything looks.

When all your stats are up, the sky is bright and the northern lights come out at night. When things fall apart, the world becomes a less welcoming place.

What's Ahead

This was actually my first coding project. I started building it before I had any real programming experience, and it progressed slowly before going on the back burner so i could focus on more substantial projects. Now that I've got better tools and a lot more know-how, I've started the code over from scratch with the original game design intact.

The core mechanics are designed and the build is underway. It's not a very high priority project but the vision is clear and all the important stuff is figured out.

Platform

Built in Flutter, targeting iOS, Android, and web.