Game Play Ideas

This page is dedicated to any wacky ideas you might have for Dr. Eric's wild journey

Ideas:

1. Michael's Ideas
2. Gavin's Ideas
3. Isabelle's Ideas
4. Mahaela's Ideas
5. AnhQuan's Ideas

Michael's Ideas

• Aerial triggers that modify gravity when the player collides into it. The triggers could change the direction that gravity points, change the magnitude of the gravitational force, or could shut it off all together. This feature might make some interesting puzzles.

Gavin's Ideas

• Making the head transport into a different dimensions when it bounces to the rhythm of a special song that plays when the player enters a transportation zone.
• Gravity shifting when the player hits a wall and repositions the camera to turn 90 degrees to this new orientation.
• During the wonderland adventure Mother Squid will act as a guide where players will press a squid button and mother squid will pop up to give helpful advice
• Between levels we should do an Amnesia approach where randoms quotes/phrases from mother squid are displayed to the player. Some of these quotes can be funny, thought-provoking, condescending, and any other theme that is interesting to add.
• Dr. Eric both worships the Mother Squid and prays to the “mother” squid for guidance
• An idea for the way to transport Dr. Eric’s head throughout a death scene in a psychedelic way is to create a rotating box with psychedelic images on the inside. If the players fall off the edge they can land within this box (which can be textured to look like anything) to transport them back to safety.

Isabelle's Ideas

1. Look at University of Lalla San Diego (ULSD) concrete plaque of the university building
2. Zoom into Dr. Eric in the laboratory at the end of the day cleaning up the lab (just sweeping a broom). Happy music. Very simple music since he has yet to ingest anything
3. Dr. Eric then accidentally hits a shelf and a bunch of different flasks with different colored chemicals mix and that gives off a gas/falls into Eric’s mouth. After ingesting/inhaling it, Dr. Eric notices nothing wrong with him and continues to clean the lab (the player however will notice how the background is slightly becoming distorted/psychedelic). He then looks at the time and realizes he needs to get home soon to feed his “mother” squid.
4. After getting onto his bike, Dr. Eric rides down the road towards his home. 10min sequence. 3 different lanes, Dr. Eric needs to dodge things as he tries to get home.
5. Case 1: But once he messes up, his head falls off as due to the body and bike stopping because of he hit the object. Case 2: Second case, if player makes it through the 10 min sequence that gets increasingly hard as the time goes on, mother squid will come out of nowhere and hit Dr. Eric’s head off his body. This 10 min sequence will end with a 1-minute marathon of doing the most difficult final stretch we can make. This last minute should force the player into doing near-perfect timing of avoiding objects. If the player manages to survive this one minute marathon they will get a secret bonus scene where Mother Squid knocks offs Dr. Eric’s head.
6. Surprised, the body tries to scratch its head because it’s confused about the Mother Squid and realizes its head isn’t there and is like “Oh.... hmmm that’s interesting” and runs off into the direction of home.
7. As the head “falls” off, it is then projected into another dimension.
8. Stuff happens for 90% of the game
9. As the effects of ingesting/inhaling the mixture of chemicals, Dr. Eric finds his head coming back to the real world dimension where the player has to play one more “mini-game” in order to get the head on the body.
10. After getting the head on the body, the scene pans to Dr. Eric filling a bowl of food that seems to be overflowing since the entire time he was in a different dimension was all just a dream. Dr. Eric’s squid is yelling at Dr. Eric to feed him since it’s so hungry and just before the scene closes, the “Mother” squid winks at the camera.
11. Credits roll with the style as if it were another dimension.

Other Gameplay things...

Single player || Can save their progress at any time || I’m not sure how hard this would be but is there a way to add in “Achievement” pop-ups. Like when their head falls off “You’ve achieved headlessness” or some other funny little tidbits. || Like Gavin says below: fuzzy, amnesia like break scenes in between gameplay that feature advice, random words to think about, or just any random shit || If anyone has a little design they want to see in the game like flying donuts, Nyan cat/Hello Kitty mashups, a version of their own tiny head bouncing around maybe? || Can we make the Dr. Eric head look asian??

Mahaela's Ideas

1. A countdown of some sort to add a bit of stress to the level. It can be a clock countdown called a panic timer and when it reaches zero the doctor dies. We can change a few things in the background of the game a certain milestones of the countdown to show how relaxed or panicked the doctor is. Or the countdown can be in the form of a rising wall of lava
2. Bad trip zones. parts of some of the platforms could cause adverse effects to the doctor if he passes through them i.e reduced movement speed, panic timer's speed increases, the doctor shrinks. While in the zone, the background changes to something scary.

AnhQuan's Ideas

"Its raining smiley faces!"