the world
a small town
the subenvironments
your room in a house/apartment
tree lined streets with houses, cats, birds, person every so often, cars parked.
central streets running through the town. houses interspersed with small businesses, more cars on the road, more people on the sidewalks.
business district. all businesses, restaurants, lots of people, lots of traffic.
outskirts with empty fields, train tracks and fences
aesthetics
the game is art, distinct visual style, richly wrought, with the potential for magnificent detail
game mechanics
first person. you can look down at your hands, feet, and at yourself in a mirror. it's an mmo type environment, richly detailed, one you can walk around in, walk about in the landscape, zoom in (look closer), zoom out (step further back), and have variables/npcs you can interact with. you can pick up and interact with movable objects.
the mental illnesses (eventually more, but to start with)
asperger's/autism
ptsd
schizophrenia
ocd
adhd
synesthesia
basic jist of what the game's about
every character has the same environment, same shops, same npcs, same side characters, same town layout.
the main draw of this game is that for each mental illness, the world is depicted differently.
there is a meter in a small dashboard area that keeps track of anxiety, and there are certain things you have to do in order to lessen the anxiety if the anxiety gets too high, the world starts to throb around you, turn more red, vision gets more blurry, environments get more hectic, until you do the necessary thing to return it back to normal. at all times you have to be aware of that stress meter
the npcs in the game react differently depending on which mental illness you have. if you don't make eye contact, their eyebrows scowl or they look at you as if you're weird. if you're not social enough, people start to pretend you don't exist. if you're walking on a sidewalk, someone's coming up to you, and because of your anxiety you walk to the other side of the street, they might say something hostile to you, or shake their head.
things to do
take walks
talk to people
go shopping at various types of stores
go to a restaurant
take a walk down main street
go to social events
go to the movies
go to a grocery store
go to the post office
go to a street fair
and so forth
examples of how the game depicts each mental illness
ocd
you walk to your door, attempt to leave your house. you're pulled back into the house, and things around you are heightened: things to be locked, things to be checked, and you keep trying to leave the house but you have to go back in and redo tasks a random number of times until you can finally leave. cracks in sidewalks are more visible, all the things that a person with ocd would notice are more visible, and the environments changes so that you're compulsively drawn to things.
aspergers/autism
sounds are louder. details are exceptionally vivid. patterns more evident, more math-like. people, the closer they get, take up more space, become louder. if you're in an environment with a certain amount of disorder, stress meter gets higher and higher until you enact some sense of order. flashes of visuals, coffee machine taking over mind, voices in chaos, people talking turns to gibberish, you can't understand anything anyone says to you. sensory overload happens the worse the disorder gets, or the more crowded it gets, and you have to do certain things to mitigate the anxiety: rock back and forth, flap your hands, tap tap tap tap, focus on patterns, or escape and find somewhere quiet
ptsd
cars backfire and your frame startles, get tense around the edges. stress meter goes up. closer you get to people on sidewalk, the larger, scarier and more threatening they become. stress meter goes through the roof unless you sit at the edges of rooms with your back to the wall. someone taps you on the shoulder from behind and frame jumps, stress meter shoots up. someone knocks on the door of your house and your viewframe startles, gets agitated around the periphery, and so forth.
adhd
vivid. scattered. all sorts of things jostling for viewpoint. need to multitask, and separate windows popup, side by side, of the various things you're doing to keep your mind distracted. you're doing something at the store, and vision bubbles keep popping up, ideas, distractions, ooh, something shiny, what was i thinking, it's more difficult to get things done, because the chain of events involved in actions have sections that deliberately loop and disorient the action needing to be done
how these effects are done
layout's the same for everyone, there's a basic environment with basic characters and npcs, with a randomness element thrown in for the npcs. for each mental illness, the basic environment gets different textures, audio is altered, shadows more dark, lights more bright, details more vivid, hyper realistic, surreal, and so forth
the way the player gets to experience each mental illness is through the stress meter, through how the npcs interact with them, and visual overlays of thoughts in the head trickling thru view, flashing warning signs, jostling of frame, visual overlay getting spliced, in graphic novel fashion, of the various details each mental illness insists on. it's never the same however, in that there's a degree of randomness.
additional option
you are a character seeing the world through the eyes of someone with a mental illness, but can divide your visual view into two side by sections: one in which you don't have the mental illness, one in which you do. giving you an extra special sense of just how different the mental illness viewpoint is from the neurotypical viewpoint
sandbox elements
i'd like to make the game so that it's modular, textures and skins can be modified, people can submit their own skins, audio clips, et al.
i'd like other people in the game to be able to type out things to say to others with the same mental illness: it's going to be okay, or, i know how freaky this must be, know that you're not alone
the real sandbox element: i'd like other people to be able to create their own environments to be placed in the town. a safe haven for someone with aspergers, a fun place with lots of distractions for someone with adhd, a calm environment for someone with ptsd, and so forth.
to start out with, i'd like to keep this single player, but possibly it could become multi-player in some indefinite future, if people wanted it that way
thoughts?