Patrick Curry’s Thoughts on Game Design--Toothache

Game Idea #1: Toothache

Happy new year everyone! This is the first of 52 new game ideas I plan to post in 2006. So here goes nothing…

High Concept:

Toothache is a fun little dentist simulation. You play as a dentist and do your best to keep your patients happy and keep their teeth healthy.

Platform:

Nintendo DS

Why it needs to be made:

Most games focus on the player hurting people. A few games focus on the player helping people. Toothache lets the player do either or both!

Description:

Toothache’s primary interface is a camera looking down on a mouth full of teeth. The player picks from a palette of dental tools (drills, scrapers, clamps, gause, gas, needles, etc) to apply to the patient. You can do a routine cleaning, or the involved process of drilling, scraping, filling, and capping a cavity. Each patient has a different ailment, and it’s up to the player to fix ‘em up.

Why it will be fun:

Helping people can be very rewarding. Having patients happily smile and thank the player for a job well done will be one of the primary rewards in the game, but they will also pay you money for your services, and recommend you to their friends. It will also be fun to “forget” to apply novocain to a particularly annoying patient, to pull out a tooth and see the blood gush, or hear the high-pitched whir of drill echo in a patient’s mouth.

Final thoughts:

With the popularity of Trauma Center, I think we just might see a series of medical simulations, especially for the DS and its touch-screen.

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