Submissions by Adam Thompson tagged gameidea

A puzzle adventure game in the vein of Papers, Please about a pharmacist dealing with patients and their prescriptions.

Like in Papers, Please, customers come in one at a time, each of whom hands the pharmacist a doctor's prescription.

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From here, the player must ensure the prescription as well as the prescribed medication is correct. If everything checks out, the player must then dispense the drug in the correct amount.

The first step would be to ask the customer's details, ensuring they match up with what's written - this generally includes their name and address. Next, they must check that the date of the prescription is within the appropriate time frame (a year old prescription is no longer valid, for example).

Assuming the patient's details and the validity of the prescription are all sound, you must then ensure the prescribed medication is correct - general practitioners are not usually allowed to prescribe odd dosages, for example, while specialists are. If you feel you have reason to believe there was a fault in the prescription, you may call the doctor to cross check it - though doing so on a non-faulty prescription in some cases will get you a penalty (doctors don't like to be hassled unless it's an emergency). On the contrary, dealing out incorrect drugs or dosages may lead to health problems in the patient, and in a worst case scenario may cause a death or severe injury.

If you believe the prescribed medication is correct, or if you've cross checked the information with a doctor, you must proceed to dispense the drugs in the correct amount. This part of the game plays out like a crafting mini-game in which you must locate the correct drug(s) and dole the correct amount out, or compound them with others using a mortar and pestle.

Once you're done, you counsel the patient on the drugs use, querying them for potential factors that may interfere with the drugs intended effect (such as allergies, and so on). You then hand out the medication to the patient, and on their way they go.

New patients must be entered into a database where all of their details and prescriptions are documented for future reference. A big part of the game includes cross referencing jargon / medical terms as well as patient details to ensure drugs don't interact with each other.

Like Papers, Please, customers will frequently revisit the pharmacy, where they may account their experiences (are the drugs working?) and so on. Cases where drugs may kill your patient may result in confrontations from the departed's family members and may cause dramas or even a Game Over if things get really nasty - whether somebody decides to get revenge by killing you, or by suing you for manslaughter.

Chaos theory and the butterfly effect are two thematic elements that the game builds on and is essential to the narrative and gameplay experience.

One may also see this as an educational game made for pharmacists to build virtual work experience before heading out into the actual work place.

I envision the art to be similar to Thirty Flights of Lovin' or Jazzpunk, where people are rendered as simple cardboard cutouts with different textures. This makes for a somewhat lighthearted and comical art style, yet is also economical as many wildly different characters can be made quickly and easily by changing the person's texture.

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