GAME MECHANICS
This section explains the full process of coming up with and finalising the mechanics for Dr. Gunter's Clinic, explaining how they work, and the full process of how they came to be.
Getting the overall concept
The primary gameplay of Dr. Gunter’s Clinic consists of a turn-based RPG, where the player would choose among a selection of actions to perform in order to vanquish their opponent: Their patient’s kidney stone. Each action would use up SP (skill points), in order to encourage a varied use of actions.
The above was part of the initial pitch and was done quite early. The next step was figuring out what actions the player could perform. We started by thinking of typical doctor actions, and added in funny options that fit our titular character.
SKILLS AND ACTIONS
As we already had a thematic idea of what kind of actions we wanted, it wasn't long before we had our final list of skills and actions. We decided on Punching, which would damage the kidney stone through the player clicking on a sliding bar to time their attack, Skills, which allowed the player to perform a variety of different actions, and Rest, to regain skill points. The skills allow players to recover their SP, prevent damage to their patient for a day, or increase the damage of their next attack.
The opponent kidney stone also needed to have its own set of abilities, but none that felt too daunting to the player. We decided that it would be more entertaining to have different types of kidney stones, each with their own set of abilities, as well as the abilities from the previous ones. This also served as our form of difficulty scaling, adding some intensity as the game progressed, and keeping the humour in mind. The initial ‘base’ version of the kidney stone simply attacks the patient and taunts the player, causing them to lose some SP, with other skills being based on the Kidney Stone type. For example the armoured Calcium Stone would reduce its damage taken on the next incoming attack.
As we had a wide variety of patients, we decided that each of them would give the player a unique item, each with a different effect in battle. We decided on items that each had an effect that fit the character, and as a result had effects that tied into them. For example, the Old Lady’s Yarn prevents the Kidney Stone from attacking for one turn, as it would be too tangled in it to attack.
We then made flow charts and state change diagrams to outline to the programmers how the mechanics would work, and once everything was clear it was handed to them for implementation.
BALANCING
Once the features were implemented, we could test the game ourselves, which led to the most challenging part of the design: balancing. The numbers we initially used for SP and damage values felt unbalanced and only encouraged punching, and as a result needed tuning. This was a feeling that was persistent throughout multiple iterations, with some skills feeling too unfair (taunt initially drained a lot of SP), and others felt like there was little use for them (Rest, some of the items).
After multiple iterations we eventually settled on something that felt alright, but a lot of headache would have been saved if we decided on an overall baseline for what each skill should feel like, and a protocol for how to balance something in either direction, aside from simply using numbers. We should have also had an ideal amount of turns each level should have lasted. This would have prevented the countless amount of random adjustments based on what we guessed was right, and would have reduced the total amount of iterations we needed.
GALLERY
Diagrams and flow charts that show how the mechanics work, and what they do
