Planning Phase

I'm knee deep in planning. I have many ideas, snippets, morsels that can make the game great. But I have to form it into a working game loop. I have gameplay ideas and little details that can enhance the mood, deepen the characters but these little ideas don't add up to a complete game yet. I have to start prototyping soon so I can see if the ideas gonna work. I know I'll have to sacrifice some of them because I can't cram everything into just one game.

In the mean time, I'm playing Persona 3 to get a good feel of the JRPG side of things, the navigation and the interactions. Also I'm playing Trauma Center 2 on DS because I just remembered I beat both Wii games and the first DS game but I still haven't beaten TC2 on DS, also, I started to watch House from the first season. Damn, this series is phenomenal. I'm collecting experiences, ideas while I'm trying to plan my own game right now. I have to do some Blender learning and start working with Unity soon. Damn, I have a lot to learn, a lot to plan but I really want to make this game.

Source of inspiration

The chain of inspiration as follows:

Trauma Center

The very first game that started me thinking about making a game about a doctor and life in a hospital. I liked the frantic action of the operations, the serious tone of the story and the awesome music by Shoji Meguro.

Valkyria Chronicles II

After finishing the original game I bought the second one right away but I didn't play it at once. It was too much of a setback after the first game on a technical level so I had to leave some time between the two so the differences weren't as painful. What really grabbed me in the second game was the dialogues and cutscenes. As I played through the game I kept thinking of my abandoned hospital game idea like "I could do the dialogues with portraits but have them blink, maybe some lip movement". But overall the dialogues were like scenes from a simple yet effective graphic novel.

House

This is a no brainer. I bought the whole series of House and finished watching it last year. I loved the whole detective aspect of it and the luxurious private hospital feel. Everything was so modern and clean. I didn't understand much of the doctor-talk but I enjoyed it very much. Also, House had some influence on the Trauma Center series.

Persona 3

In the early brainstorming session my friend and I were talking about making the game a little more than Trauma Center. Have something more than just the operations, let the player have some branching paths based on decisions or maybe let the player walk around the hospital some on the down time. Or maybe let the player have an office where they can take a look at personal stuff. Then I found Persona 3. Yeah, I'm a late comer to the Persona series. The everyday life of a student looked charming, I liked how you have to balance your free time between building relationships and improving your stats. And just the free roaming of the game's world grabbed me and I knew at that moment I need to integrate this into my hospital game idea somehow.

Also, I uploaded a new photo to the 3D learning post, the donut tutorial is complete :)