Split-brain man

Summary:

This is a pixel-styled parkour game which requires two players’ tacit teamwork. The character jack is a split-brain man who decides to go to the hospital to get treated on his sequela. In this game, one player should control the walking process, and the other should keep the character balanced. There are mainly four levels: at home, on the street, on the bus, and in the hospital. For each level, players should use different strategies to get through troubles; in the fourth level, which is the hospital, players will have a comprehensive application to their garnered strategies. The whole process may take players half or one hour to complete. After playing, players will not only experience the tense when keeping balanced, but they will also find it interesting to walk the character smoothly with the controls of two players.

Story:

The character Jack, who did split-brain surgery in order to alleviate epileptic seizures, has been suffering a lot from the sequela: his two hemi cerebrum are controlling his body separately as two souls. As a result, he finds it difficult to balance his body when walking.  Now, he notices that a hospital has just come up with a new idea to eliminate the sequela. Considering such huge influence to his daily life that the separation of his consciousness brings, Jack decides to take a long, terrible adventure to the hospital.

Background:

The idea of split-brain man came from a video that I watched about a realistic symptom— the absence of corpus callosum, which may cause a split in the patient's consciousness. I was really curious about split-brain men's feeling, since the video mentioned that if such men learn a knowledge via left eye and examining them by their right eye, they will not be capable of answering it and will claim that they have never learnt such thing before. Since then, I intended to design a game that enables normal people to experience the split-brain symptom shows players how difficult it is for a split-brain man to walk under the control of two consciousness. Meanwhile, cooperating with another player also improves relationships. There comes out the audience of this game—people who want to play a game that needs cooperation and want to play challenging games with another person in order to enjoy happiness.

Level desgin:

Level1: This level is a great opportunity for players to become familiar with the walking process and to practice their "walking skills".

Level2: This level becomes more complicated. I want players to use their surroundings, like the box, to get rid of some troubles that may be a result from split-brain. For example, it is hard for the character to climb on the bridge, so he needs to drag the box and jump on to the bridge; it is also hard for him to jump for a long distance, so he needs to fill the hole by the box, hence making it seems like a flat ground.

Level 3: hospitals are not always near to people's apartments. So does the hospital in the game. Because it's impossible for a split-brain man to walk such a long distance, bus is no doubt the most optimal one. However, players should not that it is also hard for the character, even if he stays in the bus. As a result, I come up with with this rule: the character will be falling if players do not keep him balance.

Level 4: level 4 is not so hard despite of the prejudice people have on the last level of games. However, in level 4, I intend players to utilize most of the skills they garnered from previous levels, just like a final exam.

Inspiration (QWOP):

For the mechanics of the game, I made a reference to the game QWOP. It's a single-player game which requires the player to control the runner's legs to run in the playground. Similar to the QWOP, I designed two pairs of keys to separately control the character's legs and two arrows to keep the character balanced.

Physical prototyping & testing:

In order to test the feasibility of my proposed solution for moving legs, I asked my friend to test the paper prototype with me: I moved one of the legs and balanced the character when walking, and my friend moved another leg in order to cooperate with me.

refine:

The physical prototyping gave me a general idea of how to construct the bones. Furthermore, I realized the importance of physical prototyping, since before it I actually had no idea about how to construct the bones and make the character walk smoothly.