DevLog (still very indecisive)

A late start to a not very forgiving 12 weeks of game development, my team and I only got together in Week 2 to brainstorm about a game that we would like to dedicate our time to for the coming months. After a very indecisive week of discussion, we finally settled on an idea that not many has been produced nor produced to a higher quality, and simply something we feel like is innovative and worth-while.

The game idea started off as "eye simulator", an idea that is fairly aligned with other existing simulator (Ex. Hand simulator,  Surgeon simulator, etc.) The idea is played out on a controller with left and right joystick to control the corresponding eye, while the other controls allow the player to control eye shutter and eyelash/ eye brown movements. As interesting as this may sound, we failed to come up with a compelling gameplay for the mechanics so we simplified the idea to simply "seeing".

This led us to the thought of a single player VR test-cheating game with one simple mechanic of tracking the player's head movement. The game is played out with an AI teacher scanning the room at the front of the class in a random pattern, while the player as the student (who didn't study for his test) has to look around the premise for answers that his classmate/ friend outside the room/ phone to cheat. The player will have to look into the direction of these "methods" to gain answers then look back at their test paper to automatically write them out (animation). While all that happens, the player has to constantly check for the teacher, if she catches the player cheating she will yell out their name (which we will manually record a list of common names and allow the player to enter their name before the game starts) and scold the player - doing this we hope the game provides the player with anticipation and fear of a "jumpscare" when they are caught. However, we think that this might not be very compelling gameplay-wise as the player is only controlling the game with their head and not giving much controls for their hands. Perhaps this game is going to be a tense experience some might look towards, but we as a team set ourselves to making a game with funky mechanics such as the examples of existing simulator mentioned above.

Therefore, we went back to the idea of the "eye" and settled on a game where the players will control two eyeballs separately with two corresponding joysticks on the controller (left eye left joystick, right eye right joystick). The game will be played splitscreen. The player has to navigate a lab room where their final goal is to place themselves (the eyeballs) back into a patient laying on the bench. The jankiness comes in where the player will not be able to see much when they move the eye, the camera will follow the pupil and set itself to rotate when moved. This means that player not only has to struggle getting themselves around the room filled with spillage that can damage or distrort their vision, but also has to position their eyeballs strategically. A few of the scenarios we think that may be fun to implement are: AI janitor or nurse strolling around the room so the player has to avoid being stepped on; chemical puddles that will distort the player's vision and requires water to clean off; a keyboard so the player's end game will be sending an email to the doctor so they can do the surgery and place the eyes back. We are now set for our remaining weeks and will start the production work for this game idea.