Concept Document

Concept Document

Authors: Flurries Entertainment (Team 1)--Jennifer Estaris, Michael Ilardi, Jonathan So, and Jason Winokur
Date Updated: Sunday, October 19, 2003

Working Title: Rogue Cholesterol
(Alternative: Cholesterogue)

Overview:

Rogue Cholesterol is a top-down scrolling game in which the player manipulates a glob of cholesterol navigating the human bloodstream. Bucking the norms of conventional cholesterol society, our hero is uninterested in clogging arteries and causing heart failure. Rather, it is attempting to escape from the veritable prison that is the human body. This serves as the narrative backdrop to the player's high-level goal.

As with typical overhead scrolling games such as 1942 , the glob will be carried forward automatically by the constant flow of the bloodstream. However, the glob will be allowed to move forwards, backwards, left and right, relative to this forward movement. While navigating the bloodstream, the player must avoid the accumulated cholesterol deposits on the walls, as well as random floating globs. A particularly innovative component of this game is the consequence of collisions with said deposits: rather than die or lose energy, the glob grows larger. This larger glob will be slower and more sluggish in its movements, making it more difficult to control and fit through narrow passageways. If the cholesterol becomes so large as to not be able to fit through a narrow passageway in the blood vessels, then it will have clog the bloodstream and the player fails the objective, causing congestive heart failure in the hapless human whose bloodstream he must navigate.

Visually, the bloodstream will vary in width: from the entire width of the screen to a width smaller than the size of the cholesterol itself. There may be valve flaps that alternately open and close, and even portions of the vessel that are completely blocked (this seeming impossibility will be dealt with further down in the article). The levels will have a "twisty" and organic feel. The areas outside the vessel (the non-playable area) will be a pulsing red/pink gradient, simulating the beating of the heart. In conjunction with the high speed game play and the omnipresent pulsing, there will be a high-energy soundtrack lending the game a face-paced running-the-gauntlet feel.

The final, and perhaps most important element of gameplay in Rogue Cholesterol are the power-ups, which are significant both in their functionality and in the way they are obtained. Power-ups, are objects that will give your cholesterol glob special powers or advantages. Here are some of the current power-ups:

A power-up that cuts down the mass of your cholesterol glob by some percentage.
A power-up that provides a temporary enzyme shield around your glob, so that other globs bounce off upon contact.
A power-up that changes the shape of your cholesterol from originally a round glob, into an aerodynamic spaceship or airplane shape (parodying other games in the top-down scrollers), and allowing you to fit and maneuver better, even with the same mass.
A power-up that allows you to diffuse into innumerable particles for a second or two, thus allowing you to pass through solid blockades, before re-fusing back into the glob.
(indefinite) A power-up that allows the glob to have a firing-mechanism, similar to the "flower" in the Mario Bros. series.

To obtain these power ups while navigating the bloodstream and avoiding obstacles, the player must also collect points or "ATPs", scattered around randomly. Each power-up will have a certain ATP value, and when the player has accumulated enough ATPs, they can buy the power-up using a primitive purchasing system (probably 1 key to scroll through power-ups available, and 1 other key to buy). Thus the player can choose which power-ups to use in what situation and when to stock up on ATPs. It is important to note that the player will only be able to collect as many ATPs as the maximum power-up cost. Until the player spends his ATPs, he or she will not be able to collect anymore, thus discouraging stockpiling ATPs, and instead emphasizing careful choice of power-up usage.

FADT Analyses:

Intention:
This game provides intention by allowing the player the opportunity to make plans based upon the current situation and their understanding of the game play options. This is apparent in both the short-term and long-term game plans. In the context of the short-term game plan, players must navigate a world full of obstacles and rewards, avoiding first and seeking out the latter . The player is forced to constantly make short-term plans in the form of real time decisions as the world changes around him. In the long-term, players must wisely manage resources (ATP) and be prepared to spend them at appropriate moments. Some challenges can only be overcome by planning. For example, some passages are simply too narrow for the player to pass in their regular form and require the use of a power-up.

Perceivable Consequence:
This game provides perceivable consequence by giving the player a small set of actions and power-ups and supporting them consistently throughout the game. The player will always have the option to use any of their power-ups at any time and the results will always be the same. Some choices may not lead to a positive outcome, but the player will always understand why their choices either succeeded or failed, and will be capable of reformulating the plan and trying again.

Narrative:
The designer-driven story involves a woman with a high cholesterol level (300+ milligrams) whose doctor gives a prescription for Lipitor, a potent medicine for reducing cholesterol. To celebrate, she has a beer and a bacon sandwich, with chocolate for dessert, and goes to bed. Deep within her body, the cholesterol community already has an ominous sense of apocalypse. Indeed, their cities are quite overpopulated. Worse, the brain is sending a system-wide message, alerting the rest of the body that in 6-8 hours, the woman will go to the pharmacy to pick up her medicine. The Rogue Cholesterol, an HDL more sentient than its compatriots, knows there is something wrong with this reality, and begins to escape...and save as many lipoprotiens as possible. Low-density lipoprotiens ("bad" cholesterol), on the other hand, have come to their own solution: the best way to prevent the Lipitor from invading is to block an artery and cause a heart attack.

This game provides a particularly unique narrative. There are very few games that take place inside of the human body, and probably none are from the perspective of a cholesterol molecule. This far-fetched idea allows the game to take the player on a voyage of exploration and intrigue. The player will be carried though out the human body, through blood-vessels, mucus-membranes, and organs to the end of the human body...

Background and Research:

Microsurgeon (1982): Videogame released by Imagic.You navigate the Robot Probe through the patient's blood stream, outmaneuvering white blood cells that attempt to slow you down. Remove a tumor from the brain, a blood clot from near the heart and much more.

Innerspace (1987): Sci-fi humor movie. A hapless store clerk must foil criminals to save the life of the man who, miniaturized in a secret experiment, was accidentally injected into him.

Body Wars: Interactive Movie at Epcot Center

Fantastic Voyage (1966): Movie based off a Bixby story. A surgical team is miniaturized and inserted into a dying man

Laparoscopic Surgery: Microinvasive technique using a small, high-resolution video-camera and a few customized instruments to perform surgery.

Technical Aspects of the Game:

What follows is a brief overview of some of the technical aspects of Rogue Cholesterol. The tedious details of the implementations are left out for simplicity's sake. Rogue Cholesterol will be implemented with tile-based, scrolling engine. That is to say, the foreground will be rendered with bitmapped tiles of a regular, designated resolution. To achieve an "organic" look, the tiles will support transparency which will allow for curved shapes and walls. The background will be implemented as one or more large, scrolling, bitmapped images. The use of several layered images allows for a parallax effect. Layers of backgrounds (with transparency) may be scrolled at different rates to create the illusion of depth.

Levels will be created in a level editor which allows the designer to draw tiles onto a map. Tiles will be arranged internally in banks which define properties of the tiles. Such properties can include solidity, damage infliction, etc. Special control tiles are used to mark the end of the level.

Enemies are inserted into the level map much like tiles are. In other words, special values in the array representing the level indicate the type of enemy found at that position. However, enemies do not behave like regular tiles; they are visually represented by multiple frames of animation of arbitrary height and width. When the game engine scrolls to the point in the array where an enemy is found, it adds the enemy to an array of enemies currently on the screen. The game engine then controls the enemies using both predefined and random actions and movements. This continues until the enemy is dead or leaves the screen, at which point its entry in the array is marked as dead.

The graphics implementation has not yet been decided upon, although DirectX is under serious consideration.