gameplay

GAMEPLAY

The main way to stop M. Health from reducing from hallucinations, which will happen

more frequently than influence from residents, is a small makeup mirror.

A common method to combat visual hallucinations from the schizophrenic people I talked to was using a reflective surface and/or a phone to check if what they were seeing was real. Since visual hallucinations can be extremely realistic, this is the best option, since hallucinations can literally be people you know existing as if they were there in reality.

When the player encounters a distressing hallucination, they must turn around completely and use the mirror to check behind them. This instills some vulnerability in the player in the case that whatever Frankie is seeing ends up ACTUALLY being real in those rare moments, because now your back is turned to whatever you see, and of course, turning around you take your eyes off of what you were seeing, so there’s no telling what the thing that is behind you will do when you aren’t looking.

The mirror does not actually help gain M. Health back. Maybe a little bit, as mental

assurance that what you saw wasn’t real. Rather, it stops the continuous reduction of it. The MAIN way to gain M. Health BACK is to use your guitar.

Frankie can use her guitar to write a song. This will ensue a minigame similar to

the poem minigame from Doki Doki Literature Club, in which you have to choose

subjects that are more comforting and avoid subjects that are more distressing. I am not super sure how to implement this game or what it will look like in the end.

I was thinking of having fixed intervals of where you are able to use your guitar, similar to Night In The Woods, where Mae can only play the guitar if she wakes up or goes to bed. That would mean having to maintain the M. Health stat until those intervals. After choosing the correct words, you get to listen to the song she wrote. Her music genre will most likely be something nice and calm but lyrically heavy, like Men I Trust or Clairo.

I don’t know how to make music.

I might make it so that every morning, after Frankie wakes up from her PTSD nightmares, the player loses M. Health (this is important symbolically?). I am not sure about this because there’s no telling exactly how much M. Health the player has when they go to sleep (and if it goes to zero then she will commit suicide regardless). If I do implement it I might make it so the dreams cannot reduce your M. Health past 1. But at the same time it feels unfair to forcefully reduce a stat that the player has to maintain. I’ve seen this argument made for Elden Ring where they stated that it was unfair for the player to take unavoidable damage because it’s the player’s job to maintain health, therefore everything should be able to be dodged. This was not made as an argument to make Elden Ring easier, but an argument against specific moments in Elden Ring that were ridiculous (Malenia’s flurry attack and Consort Radahn’s…. well literally anything he throws at you tbh.)