This week, Ian emerges from the clubhouse vents to fill-in for Stephen as Dale gives us a bare minimum prompt with maximum implications.
Prompt
"Make a game called 'Triage Simulator'"
Game type
Design document
Player count
1
Rules
- Triage - the verb
- Learn about the consequences of your actions later
- Papers Please-like interface
- Situation/Scenario
- Buckets to sort in - limited space within the bucket
- Every level is a different situation
- Level 1 - Hospital
- Level 2 - Pizza Day at the Elementary School
- Level 3 - Water Station at a Marathon
- Level 4 - Planning a Foot Route as a Courier
- Level 5 - Anubis is back from vacation and he’s backlogged
- ???
- Level 7 - In the pizza store making the pizza for the elementary school
- A system-based puzzle - Scheduling and ordering
- Information you don’t have
- How many more of each type are coming in?
- Information that lets you anticipate incoming situations
- Events happening in the background that mean something going to come in at some point
- Information you don’t have
- You get the case
- Outside context as a bulletin on the side that is in natural language and would have some influence on the level that the player doesn’t know yet
- Time constraint known (5min, 90s)
- The Puzzle
- Sorting - the simplest system possible of how much resources go where
- Highest Priority
- Pretty Important
- Mid-tier
- Low Priority
- Meh
- Cannot rank within the bucket (eg. cannot say there is a highest priority of highest priority items)
- Put in buckets or stamp it with a stamp
- Each item gets ranked on certain variables which then designate which tier it should be assigned
- No right answer - aiming for highest efficiency
- Sorting - the simplest system possible of how much resources go where
- Walkthrough a level - Sandwich lunch orders
- BIG TRIAGE MACHINE that gets plonked onto a desk
- Area of the broader context of what’s happening (updated throughout the shift time)
- Deck of cards with variables for that level (eg. Order for 3, the order, how much it cost, extra paid to rush, for or to go)
- Timing element - different form per level
- Punches into the card to annotate the cards (with unique shaped punches <3) with before making the final decision that you can’t UN-punch either as a 1-5 scape or YES/NO bool:
- Urgency
- Impact
- Severity
- Scale
- Consequence
- Exceptional (YES/NO)
- Feed the punch card into a different part of the machine which crunches the punch numbers and gives a recommendation that the player can then either follow or ignore
- Want to be able to punch as much as you want into one card
- If punch 2, will average the numbers out
- Or always read the lowest number?
- What if more than 2 punches? The machine is snarky at you?
- Put the card into 1-5 slots in the contraption that then stamps the thing and keeps it in its own mail slot as the final verdict (can’t get it back) with counters of how many went through each slot.
- Someone picks up the tickets periodically and gives vague body language feedback on the ticket
- Accessibility features:
- Pause while reading
- Time scale adjustments 0.75x, 0.5x, 0.25x