GAME BACKGROUND

SUMMARY

Game made for our Game Production class as Game Development college students. Theme given for this term was Medical & Hospitals. The term was 3 months long, but taking into account our time and manpower restraint due to multiple academic responsibilities, we are estimating this took 2 weeks in consecutive hours. Please forgive any bugs and let us know about them here!

Differential diagnosis in video game form — stories inspired by the cases of House MD as a half 2D visual novel and half 3D first person puzzle adventure inspired by the mysteries of Ace Attorney and Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

1. THE PITCH

The pitch started with two words – Differential Diagnosis. Sound familiar? During the very first class, we were asked to submit our own game idea that fit under the term’s theme of Medical & Hospitals.

Here is the direct quote of our project manager’s two-sentence submission: A differential diagnosis game using a mystery game approach. Patients come in and tell you about symptoms that are not immediately or plainly explained by one condition. Use the patient's history, find out what they are exposed to at home or at work, to find out what obscure, rare disease or diseases they may have.

2. THE INSPIRATIONS

One of our main inspirations should have been obvious from the pitch, but the approach to the cases or medical conditions are very much inspired by House MD.

If you haven’t read it in our game description, this game is half a visual novel interrogation and half a first person investigation – our other 2 main inspirations are the Ace Attorney franchise and Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

3. THE GAMEPLAY

How about the two different gameplay genres we chose for our game? Why choose seemingly opposing genres to put together in one project? Here’s how the gameplay works.

Visual Novel

How can we do so much with so little? We realize that visual novels get a bit of a bad rep in the gaming community, as people often see them as just reading through a script with visuals. We, however, respect visual novels as a gameplay genre with a different kind of strength.

The parts of the level or story that happen in the hospital are all in visual novel form. This is where you can talk to patients and co-workers to gather information, symptoms, and evidence that you can use along the way. You will be able to show or present these by opening your Doctor’s Journal. Presenting evidence or new diagnostic options you want the patient to consider will prompt even more information out of them, helping the story progress.

3D First Person Puzzle

Now, this is the part that most people look forward to. When the player is further into the story and gets prompted to investigate the patient’s usual surroundings, the game changes to a 3D investigation scene. The player then solves a series of implicit puzzles to get information that are a little more hidden to aid with narrowing down the diagnosis.

THINGS WE WANT TO IMPROVE

Asymptomatic was made by a group of 5 students who were taking multiple other subjects and with tight deadlines set by the curriculum. There are definitely things we had to compromise on, and we know these intimately.

BETTER STORYTELLING

We had to do a lot of research on Asymptomatic to keep the process and information as accurate as we possibly could while fitting said research into a game. However, this led us to have less time to dedicate to actually telling the story well. We feel as if there are sensitive topics we could have approached better and that our characters don’t have set or distinct personalities yet.

BETTER ART DIRECTION

Again, we worked on this heavy story based game as a group of 5 – our project manager took on six other roles! So is it really a surprise when we say we had no art director? We definitely had a more concrete vision when we were planning the game, but since we couldn’t force our artists to learn completely different art styles for this project, especially with our deadlines and their other academic responsibilities, we let them do what they were comfortable with! This is a fine approach, but with no art director to make sure each artist is following the vision we decided on at every step, for every output – that vision can lose its way.

MAKE IT OUR OWN

Take this with a grain of salt! When you’re studying Game Development, juggling other academic responsibilities (and more), and trying to fit everything into a single school term, it can be hard to really make things your own. Because of the constraint on time and manpower, it is more likely you’ll only draw inspiration from 1-3 other works. Here’s the thing: it will be very obvious. That’s not always a bad thing. But it is human to want to make things your own, despite inspiration. This is to hoping that all of us aspiring game developers will one day have the time, the manpower, or both and be able to make games that truly feel like our own! (Also – we want to compose our own OST.)