70 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
70 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# Game Design Document
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Chemo-Sim
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## Elevator Pitch
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First-person chemo simulator. Painfully accurate. Darkly funny. You don't beat cancer — you survive the treatment.
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## Core Pillars
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1. **Medical Accuracy** — Symptoms, treatments, and timelines grounded in real chemo regimens
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2. **Dark Comedy** — Absurdity, gallows humor, and uncomfortable laughs as coping mechanism
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3. **Empathy Through Experience** — Players feel what patients feel, without after-school-special moralizing
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## Tone Guide
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- **Voice:** First-person internal monologue. Sarcastic, exhausted, occasionally surreal. Think: _Fight Club_ narrator meets hospital discharge paperwork.
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- **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.
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- **"No filter" means:** Honest about bodily functions, honest about fear, honest about the weird places your brain goes. Not edgelord shock content.
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- **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.
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## Gameplay Loop
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```txt
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Arrive at hospital → Check in → Wait (minigames happen here) → Treatment session → Side effects kick in → Go home → Cope → Repeat
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```
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Each cycle = 1 treatment day. Side effects accumulate. Mental state degrades. Dark humor escalates.
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## Symptom Systems
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| Symptom | Mechanic | Visual/Audio Cue |
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| ---------------- | --------------------------- | ------------------------------------ |
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| Nausea | Screen tilt, vomit QTE | Color desaturation, stomach gurgle |
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| Hair loss | Progressive visual | Mirror reflection, clumps in shower |
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| Taste distortion | Food minigame becomes wrong | Metallic sheen on food, wrong sounds |
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| Chemo brain | UI corruption | Text scrambles, buttons move |
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| Fatigue | Movement slows, inputs lag | Heavy breathing, blurred edges |
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## Minigames
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### Vomit (Phase 1)
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Keys appear in sequence. Miss = mess. Hit = clean-ish. Accuracy tracked.
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### Eat This Food (Phase 2)
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Food appears normal. You remember it tasting different. Choose what's "wrong" — taste, texture, temperature. Always wrong. Gets harder.
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### Conversation Memory (Phase 2)
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NPC asks questions. You respond. Later, they reference your answers. If chemo brain scrambled it, dialogue branches to confusion.
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### Hospital Navigation (Phase 2)
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Find your way while dizzy. Controls invert randomly. Screen tilts. Timer counts down.
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## Progression
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- **Day counter:** Week 1 through Week 6+
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- **Cumulative effects:** Each symptom has intensity 0–100. Increases per treatment. Some plateau, some don't.
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- **Regimen variance:** Different drug combos produce different symptom profiles. Random at start, player can't choose — because patients can't.
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- **No win condition.** You finish treatment or you don't. The game ends when the regimen ends.
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## Unlockables
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- Hidden minigames (absurdist: argue with insurance, decode hospital bill)
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- Internal monologue logs (unlock sarcastic commentary on each symptom)
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- Achievement names are dark jokes
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