Long post about some DOB design thoughts/decisions regarding info points

Hello all! I wanted to give you an update on what I’ve been up to!

So, firstly, Plastic Spouse Interrogation is still being polished however it is very close to being done and so I must again remind you to fill out the credits information form if you wish to be credited in the Patron credits under your desired name. So again, please fill out this form if you wish to be credited under a different name than your Patreon name:

https://forms.gle/bT8EYiqJVN5GaYmT7

Lately most of my efforts have been towards a pretty elaborate sequence that you play through in one of the endings. It involves an unprecedented (for me!) amount of complex animations with decently high poly models. It is a sort of cinematic sequence (compared to the rest of the game) however it is fully interactive (except for the very last part of it…) and interactive in a way that is not usual of a typical Yames game.

In DOB development news, I’m making my way towards putting out another devlog video… I would like to show off in depth the exam portion of the game. [Brief aside: the exam portion of the game is what I am calling the portion of the game where it is very similar to Discover My Body...you are looking at someone, scanning them, watching them transform.]

There were a lot of game design decisions to be made in trying to make a much larger sequel to a game you could complete in like 10 minutes. Who would have thought! Originally Discover My Body was driven by the player uncovering the body of the subject and scanning it for points of interest...clicking on the points of interest on each layer of the body would yield progress towards the next transformation.

My first instinct with making Discover Our Bodies was to do something similar, scan a subject, find info points, info points reveal information or sometimes have some sort of accompanying minigame, progression into the next segment of the subject’s affliction as they get worse/better. I think I dropped this because I realized that a full game of doing this wouldn’t be particularly fun or allow a lot of player creativity or experimentation. It would have been very much “on rails” which is not bad all the time but for this particular game I don’t know if would have been able to sustain itself...

Realizing this, I decided to re-approach the idea of the info point. My first stab at it was to associate mapping the body with info points. So, you uncover the body by scanning it and then can take a closer look at certain areas of it by finding info points. Every time you found an info point you’d be asked if you want to take a closer look at that relevant area. Pretty soon I felt like this also wasn’t the best way to go about things (again).

The way I’m approaching exams now is to have info points be like a list of facts/observations put together to direct the course of your input as a medical professional. What you choose to focus on, what you ignore, what you ask your subject about, is in your hands. So for instance, in the example .gif here, there’s an info point about thyroid nodules. That could be relevant to this particular subject, the PTB injection is pretty close, the nodules could be caused by it, but it also could just be something the subject is dealing with. You can chose to ignore this information (hit the trashcan button) and have the scanner disregard any information regarding this particular info point, or you can store it away for later (the button with the lower case i) and bring it up to the subject, asking the subject questions about it, how it feels, if its new.

In the original Discover My Body the process of discovery was assisted by the subject, you discovered, they gave you some information. The subject was more informed about what was happening to themselves than you were. But still, it was a collaborative process of learning together, somewhat. In Discover Our Bodies, many of the subjects will not be expound upon medical science in the same way the subject did in the original (that is where the AI assistant Dr. Morrison comes in) but these subjects are still worth talking to in order to better assist them. Not every subject will be able to talk or to articulate themselves in a way that will produce worthwhile information. And there are some questions will which lead subjects to greater distress than they are already confronting.

The system right now is pretty barebones visually and I’m still working on how to present things in a way that doesn’t create a lot of textual noise whenever you find a patch of info points. I might include some pictures too? And maybe some customizable way of organizing stored info points, tagging each one. I don’t know.

This is not the only new thing in the exam portion of the game, of course, but as visually sparse as it is I hope it gives you some idea into what I’ve been planning/thinking about. More functions of the exam portion will be revealed soon, and what has been revealed will hopefully pop a little more visually.

One last thing, you might be surprised to find out that recently I’ve been messing about with my old Father Turned Me Into Trees And Rivers Gamemaker project file. So, that might be coming to you at some point? Maybe? I can’t make any promises. It’s definitely not my main focus... My focus has been on Plastic Spouse Interrogation with bits of Discover Our Bodies thrown in when I can, but when Plastic Spouse Interrogation is done I am going to be shifting focus to Discover Our Bodies for at least a couple months...I would like to get a demo or vertical slice out this year and if I really push it I would like to be done with the game sometime at the beginning of next year. It’s always hard to tell with these things however. Somewhere in that time I will give a portion of attention to the remaining secret games I have planned/in development. I have not forgotten about any of them.

If you have read this entire post, thank you! I know it’s sort of long but again it’s more about my thinking on DOB than anything else... I hope you all are well and are looking forward to Plastic Spouse Interrogation.

Yours In Games And Discovery,

Yames