3.2 KiB
3.2 KiB
Game Design Document
Chemo-Sim
Elevator Pitch
First-person chemo simulator. Painfully accurate. Darkly funny. You don't beat cancer — you survive the treatment.
Core Pillars
- Medical Accuracy — Symptoms, treatments, and timelines grounded in real chemo regimens
- Dark Comedy — Absurdity, gallows humor, and uncomfortable laughs as coping mechanism
- Empathy Through Experience — Players feel what patients feel, without after-school-special moralizing
Tone Guide
- Voice: First-person internal monologue. Sarcastic, exhausted, occasionally surreal. Think: Fight Club narrator meets hospital discharge paperwork.
- Humor boundaries: Joke about the situation, never the patient. Punch up at the healthcare system, the absurdity of side effects, the cosmic unfairness. Never punch down at suffering.
- "No filter" means: Honest about bodily functions, honest about fear, honest about the weird places your brain goes. Not edgelord shock content.
- NPCs: Nurses are tired professionals with dark humor of their own. Other patients range from gallows-humor veterans to terrified newbies. Doctors are well-meaning but rushed.
Gameplay Loop
Arrive at hospital → Check in → Wait (minigames happen here) → Treatment session → Side effects kick in → Go home → Cope → Repeat
Each cycle = 1 treatment day. Side effects accumulate. Mental state degrades. Dark humor escalates.
Symptom Systems
| Symptom | Mechanic | Visual/Audio Cue |
|---|---|---|
| Nausea | Screen tilt, vomit QTE | Color desaturation, stomach gurgle |
| Hair loss | Progressive visual | Mirror reflection, clumps in shower |
| Taste distortion | Food minigame becomes wrong | Metallic sheen on food, wrong sounds |
| Chemo brain | UI corruption | Text scrambles, buttons move |
| Fatigue | Movement slows, inputs lag | Heavy breathing, blurred edges |
Minigames
Vomit (Phase 1)
Keys appear in sequence. Miss = mess. Hit = clean-ish. Accuracy tracked.
Eat This Food (Phase 2)
Food appears normal. You remember it tasting different. Choose what's "wrong" — taste, texture, temperature. Always wrong. Gets harder.
Conversation Memory (Phase 2)
NPC asks questions. You respond. Later, they reference your answers. If chemo brain scrambled it, dialogue branches to confusion.
Hospital Navigation (Phase 2)
Find your way while dizzy. Controls invert randomly. Screen tilts. Timer counts down.
Progression
- Day counter: Week 1 through Week 6+
- Cumulative effects: Each symptom has intensity 0–100. Increases per treatment. Some plateau, some don't.
- Regimen variance: Different drug combos produce different symptom profiles. Random at start, player can't choose — because patients can't.
- No win condition. You finish treatment or you don't. The game ends when the regimen ends.
Unlockables
- Hidden minigames (absurdist: argue with insurance, decode hospital bill)
- Internal monologue logs (unlock sarcastic commentary on each symptom)
- Achievement names are dark jokes