Ratrocity Design

This week, my group designed and made a unity game and a paper prototype out of a very obscure concept. The theme used was “game where you play a life support machine in a hospital but during the night you turn into a diseased rat”. We called the game Ratrocity. We thought this idea had potential to be a sort of balancing game – as a life support machine during the day, you are trying to heal patients to keep them from dying. As a diseased rat at night, you are trying to spread your disease to the patients to make their health go down so that they don’t heal enough to leave the hospital. In this way, the hospital will make the most money since patients will stay under its care for the greatest possible amount of time if they can’t die or heal enough to leave.

Mechanics

The mechanics of this game are fairly simple. There are six patients lying in bed on the screen, and the player must click a patient in order to give them health during the day while they are dying, or inflict harm at night while they are healing. The goal is to keep all patients alive and in the hospital as long as possible. The player gets points based on the amount of time that they can keep patients in the hospital. If all patients die or are fully healed, the game is over. The player must quickly and repeatedly click patients to have a great impact on their health. The player must move the mouse from patient to patient in order to keep them all at moderate health.

Aesthetics

                The art and sounds of the game are also not very elaborate. The general look of the game is friendly, with a smiling sun and moon representing day and night and other cheerful looking elements, but with an ugly rat at night to contrast the cheerfulness of the rest of the images. This could represent the hospital itself in the sense that it disguises itself as being good and working to heal patients, when meanwhile patients are harmed at night in order to keep them in the hospital – meaning, the ugly side of the hospital comes out at night.  

                The patients in the game are represented by hospital beds with a simple red health bar above which shrinks and grows. There is a sun or moon shown at the top right corner of the screen to represent day and night, and the screen also changes from bright (day) to dark (night) to really stress the change in time. The score is shown at the top left corner of the screen, and the player is represented by a life support machine during the day, and an ugly rat at night.

                The game does not have any music because the sounds used provide enough atmosphere that we thought any music might be distracting. As background noise, there is the beep of the life support machine going at all times. Every now and then at night, the rat will squeal. During the transition from day to night, the sound of crickets plays. During the transition from night to day, the sound of a rooster plays. These sounds also help to stress the change in time along with the change in colors and the sun or moon image at the side. Altogether, the sounds are simple, but they serve their purpose.

Dynamics

                The dynamics of the game are all shown through player choice, and how the player personally chooses to play the game. For one, the player has to make the decision between trying to keep all patients alive and in the hospital, or focusing on a select few. Ideally, keeping all patients alive would earn the player more points than just having some of them alive, though currently the score of the game is solely determined by the amount of time the player lasts without losing all patients. However, if the score was determined by both time and the number of patients in the hospital, this would give the player the choice of whether to take the riskier route in trying to keep all patients in the hospital as long as possible to earn the most points, or the safer route in trying to keep a few patients at moderate health while letting the others die or heal. The first option would be risky because it is more difficult to keep track of more patients. 

                Another interesting dynamic that is affected by player choice is the idea that since the time shifts between day and night with little to no warning, the player must make sure that they don’t heal or injure the patient too much. This is because if the player were hurting a patient with the rat at night and then the time switched to day, the patient would then begin to lose health on their own, and then the player would have to frantically take care of that patient to keep them from dying. This means that the player has to be careful to keep patients at a very balanced health rather than trying to do a whole lot of damage or healing at once.

                All in all, it was very interesting to make a game from such a strange and random concept.  To improve Ratrocity, we would have to balance the mechanics more in order to make it more difficult in lower levels (so the player can’t get by with doing nothing) and easier in higher levels (so it is actually possible to beat later levels). However, the game is still fully playable, and could actually be a lot of fun if we’d put a lot of time into balancing.