Overview
Fumofumo Space is a psychological horror game that explores identity and trauma. The story follows Rairakku, an artist who wakes up to a disturbing smell, only to uncover unsettling truths about herself and her “roommates”—Toro, Moe, and Melanie. They are not separate individuals but fragmented personalities within the same body, shaped by trauma and dissociative identity disorder (DID). Players must piece together the truth, navigate their complex dynamics, and guide them toward coexistence or chaos.
Inspiration & Research
I was inspired by Disney’s Brainiac animation and my interest in psychoanalysis, which was founded by Freud, so I planned to design a game related to multiple personalities, aka DID.
The animation “Mind Squad” uses anthropomorphic techniques to depict the workings of the main character’s brain, which includes the feelings and relaxation that the main character experiences when encountering different events, and how the main character controls these emotions, and the most interesting thing is that the animation introduces the concept of the subconscious mind to the viewers in an ingenious way.
The subconscious mind refers to those memories that have had a significant impact on us, and which are unconsciously forgotten or selectively forgotten due to various events as we grow up, but the feelings and state of mind patterns caused by these significant events will always be there, and these feelings will always appear and affect our daily lives in a variety of ways.
For example, if some people don’t understand why they are always in a harmful intimate relationship, they may want to look at their family of origin, and psychologists are always surprised to find that most of these people also have unhealthy relationships with important people in their family of origin, such as their parents, meaning that they are unconsciously trapped in an obsessive-vicious cycle.
Everyone has a subconscious mind, and people who have had a lot of unhealthy childhood experiences may develop a fixed mindset that leads to a personality disorder in adulthood. One of them is called Borderline Personality Disorder, aka BPD, and people with BPD suffer from uncertainty of self-identity, which leads to their lives being largely chaotic. Multiple personality is actually a form of high-functioning BPD, as it is likely that people with BPD have suffered more severe trauma than normal BPD sufferers, causing the brains of DID sufferers to categorise different traumatic events in order to protect them.
Think of it like a computer that puts different stories into different folders. Thus people with DID form multiple personalities within their brains, and rather than calling these personalities, I prefer to call them individuals. These different individuals have different memories and behavioural patterns, they have different personalities, hobbies, aesthetic preferences, sexual orientations…… They may be mentally healthy or very unhealthy. In any case, they are definitely different souls.
Initially, I was going to design a DID-related Simulation Game (SIM), inspired by the game Cult of the lamb:
The player, as a God-like character, helps different individuals in the main character’s body to live a better life. These different individuals may have various conflicts with each other, e.g. one of them is in love with a real person, but the others don’t like that person, etc. The player needs to work out a reasonable solution to make each individual happy.
Each individual has his own room in the brain, and the player can buy their favourite furniture in the shop to decorate their home.
I initially named the game Animals in the clouds because I chose animals to represent each individual according to their personality, so the player could also be described as a zookeeper at a magical zoo.
The player needs to assign different tasks to different individuals, such as letting them spend time learning or letting them work in various ways to earn money, so that the experience gained can help the player to upgrade. It is important to note that different ways of working may cause other individuals to have different emotions and feelings, for example, letting some individuals with a low sense of morality get money by stealing may cause those individuals with a high sense of morality to be very internally depleted and develop serious mental illnesses. ….. All these are choices that need to be made by the player.
The formation of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is often closely linked to an individual’s traumatic experiences and subconscious activities. Trauma profoundly influences emotional development and personality formation. To explore this concept, I utilized Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its emotional pyramid to categorize and summarize positive and negative emotions across different levels. These emotions span from basic survival needs to self-fulfillment needs.
For positive emotions, I mapped out layers ranging from basic needs (such as calmness and contentment) to advanced needs (such as pride and admiration). Similarly, negative emotions range from anxiety caused by a lack of security to shame arising from self-doubt. These emotions not only reflect the diversity of human needs but also highlight the complexity of psychological states.
Positive emotions:
content, energetic, excited
二
hopeful, relaxed, optimistic, peaceful, joyful
||
loving, empathetic, happy, amused, passionate
proud, confident, inspired. elated, admiring
cheerful, grateful
Negativity emotions:
outraged, grumpy, hostile. tired, distant, apathetic
二
skeptical, helpless, anxious. uneasy, stressed, confused
irritated, moody, submissive guilty, lonely, grief, depressed
discouraged, jealous, upset, frustrated, remorseful, tired. inferior, cranky, stressed. anxious, ashamed
二|
critical, sarcastic, bored, melancholic
Based on these emotional levels, I created eight characters with distinct personalities. Each character embodies specific positive or negative emotions, while also exhibiting opposing and complementary relationships with the others. Through these characters, I aim to showcase the impact of emotions on personality development and how trauma leaves imprints on emotional fluctuations, ultimately revealing the intricate diversity of human emotions.
Game Visual Design
Initially I wanted to create a SIM game, but I realised that this would make the game’s worldview too cluttered. Plus during the time I was researching for the game I played an RPG pixel game called OMORI, which was a great game with an unexpected plot direction and final ending.
The protagonist is unable to accept the fact that he accidentally killed his sister, which causes him to start entering his mind’s fantasy to escape the cruelty of reality. That is, it is divided into the real world and the inner world, where everything is beautiful, while the real world is cold and depressed. Behind the cute drawings and colourful colours, there are unacceptable cases of murder and “body dumping”. Children are often the most innocent of all, but they are also prone to do naive and reckless things as a result.
What the player has to do is to help the protagonist unravel the shadows in his mind, and in this process a lot of psychological knowledge is involved, such as the subconscious mind, and the protagonist fights his enemies in his fantasies as a kind of anthropomorphisation of the psychological shadows that we fight with on a daily basis. The game doesn’t tell us the difference between reality and fantasy, so it’s not until the end that most players realise they’re not fighting a real enemy, but themselves, and that the biggest enemy is often us.
The game’s ending is not always happy, and one of the interesting things about RGP games is that different choices can open up different paths and lead to completely different endings. The best ending for this game is that the protagonist reconciles with himself and stops living on fantasy. The bad ending is that the protagonist still chooses to live in fantasy, and the most difficult ending for the player is that the protagonist commits suicide because he can’t handle the psychological pressure.
All in all my emotions always shifted along with the plot direction of this game, and the process was very interesting.
I redesigned the characters and scenes in Resprite. Because DID patients also have an in-world in their minds, for example, different individuals can communicate, meet or rest alone in the in-world of their minds. Often the in-world appearance may be completely different from the patient’s real-life environment, and the patient may look different, e.g., the A-persona of a DID patient in the in-world is an eight-year-old boy with silver hair, while the patient’s physical body is a 35-year-old woman with brown hair. Thus Personality A may appear in reality, i.e. in the eyes of others, as a strange woman wearing a silver wig and behaving in a childish and reckless manner.
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Here’s one of the characters I designed: she’s one of Fumo’s personalities, her name in the in-world is Moe, she’s a junior high school girl with short pink hair, a kind and naive personality, and likes to wear cute clothes. In the real world her name is Kuroneko, a mature woman who likes to wear all black clothes and sexy stockings. Kuroneko is very scheming and vindictive, and she will take revenge on those who mess with her in the most vicious way.
In the Riworld, the rooms of different individuals may be white, but the room Fumo inhabits in the real world is actually a room with green and grey walls.
Characters
As you can see in the picture to the left, the MBTI is a very hot psychometric test right now (I’ve deliberately labelled the characters’ in-world and real-world MBTIs in the previous pages).
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality type rating instrument developed from Carl Jung’s type theory, which suggests that people are born with different psychological preferences in the way they perceive and make decisions. The most superficial part of its theory is four opposing sets of innate preferences: introversion and extroversion, practicality and intuition, thinking and emotion, and judgement and perception, and the four sets of preferences can make up 16 stable personality types. (https:// zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%82%81%E7%88%BE%E6%96%AF-
%E5%B8%83%E9%87%8C%E6%A0%BC%E6%96%AF%E6%80%A7%E6%A0%BC%E5%88%86%E9%
A1%9E%E6%B3%95)
And the original theory of MBTI is actually Jung’s Eight Dimensions:
The original concept of Jung’s Eight Dimensions came from Jung’s book Psychological Types, in which he categorised people into eight types through attitudinal and functional types.
Attitudinal types are distinguished by an individual’s attitude towards an object and are classified as introverted and extraverted (I/E).
Functional types are divided into 4 types based on judgemental and perceptual, with judgemental functions including thinking and feeling (T/F) and perceptual functions including sensing and intuition (S/N).
The judgemental function reflects how we make decisions and the perceptual function reflects how we gather information. The resulting 8 types are Ti, Te, Fi, Fe, Si, Se, Ni, and Ne.
Each person (excluding severe dysfunction, mental illness and personality disorders) has a full range of eight-dimensional functioning, with each function playing a different role. This is often referred to as the
“hierarchy of functions”: dominant, auxiliary, tertiary and inferior. (https://jzmbti.com/article3548759442）
Gameplay
