Meromy, a game

One interesting thing about using what's essentially a dictionary to generate the words is that I have no idea what could come out of this thing. There are words that pop up that I've never heard of before, words that I'm not even sure are words. Words that spontaneously comment on the process of the game. "Aphasia" has come up, but so have "apnea", "aspasia", and "Alica".

It's like throwing a dictionary into a shredder and making a collage out of the scraps that come drifting out.

A slight change: a new name.Based on some feedback, the core mechanic was a mismatch for the experience of aphasia in particular. At some future point I'd like to make a game that specific represents aphasia, but in this case I thought it'd be better to broaden the metaphor and make the game about memory loss in general.

More crazy word selection. The visual look is a bit more refined (and is in constant motion). Keep in mind that the word list is completely unfiltered. I basically dumped a dictionary in there, so who knows what you'll find.

The game has a database of random objects. Objects from this list periodically rain down from the sky. When the player encounters an object, the player gets to name to object, as defined above. The first challenge is to remember with new names have gotten associated with which object. Additionally, encountering a new object gives the player a hint as to what the correct name might be, but the hint may not be correct (“Is it a spatula? Or maybe a deliveryman?”).

Also scattered around the tiny world are NPCs, who each request that the player find three objects for them. The objects are chosen at random from the object list and fall from the sky into the world somewhere for the player to find them. NPCs who get all 3 things vanish and are replaced by another NPC somewhere else. (It’d be nice to have some continuity in the NPCs, so they tell you their names and previous ones will pop up again later. Put it on the wishlist.)

Giving the correct object to the NPC increases your score by 1. Giving the wrong object to an NPC causes the PC to lose one hitpoint (represented as black hearts up in the corner, I think). Losing all of your hitpoints ends the game.

However, giving the NPC the wrong object also increases the alienation. First, the NPC quest instruction start glitching and randomly but briefly displaying incorrect words. The player’s ability to guess the true name is obscured by some of the objects changing the graphics used to depict them to be even more obscure. Less mechanically relevant, weird and alien objects will begin to appear in the background behind the landscape. The intent is to cause the player to be increasingly disoriented by the progression of the condition and to gradually increase the difficulty to the point of inevitable failure.

Aphasia is a game based loosely on anomic aphasia, the medical condition of being unable to remember names. As the player plays the game, every object they encounter will ask the player to choose a name from a cloud of random words...but the correct name is repelled by the player’s cursor, leaving the player in an increasingly mis-named world.

 My original plan was to do a relatively serious game, along the lines of Every Day The Same Dream. The protagonist (a middle-aged stroke victim) would struggle with daily life while becoming increasingly alienated from the world around him. The objects in his world would become more visually bizarre every time he made a mistake about a name. Then I added aliens. Then I took the aliens out. Then I rewrote the design.