Background Story

The game follows the story of a young alchemist and his/her quest in finding the “Philosopher’s Stone”. To do that, the protagonist (player) will have to pass through a series of mini-quests creating a various number of objects first, so that his/her knowledge expands, as well as use those new assets in his/her advantage, before he/she has the capability to complete his/her final quest.

Overview

The game takes place on a fully interactive alchemist’s desk where various ingredients and objects exist at the disposal of the player. On each level the player has to craft a very specific magical potion or item by following the recipe provided and, when specified, within a certain time limit. The recipe of the potions that must be crafted are covered in the Recipe Book, which will serve as the main guideline to the player during the game.

Careful hand-eye coordination of both hands is required so that the various ingredients and components can be fetched as well as mixed or combined together into creating the final required potion or item. Different ingredients or objects may require different handling, some more easier while some others harder. As the game progresses recipes with ingredients of more difficult handling will be required to be created by the player. Object handling in the context and theme of the game is performed with two wands each one for the two input controllers (externally represented by laparoscopic instruments), putting to use all available movements as employed in real MIS surgeries.

All objects have physical properties and interacting properties with one another. Careful handling of those materials is essential for the player to accumulate a good score, not waste Core Ingredients and progress through the game faster. As such, if handling is not done properly, they will fall or even break resulting in a bad score as well as losing an amount of Core Ingredient (see below) that the objects might contain. Furthermore two or more objects may create a specific effect when interacting together.

Metrics and Scoring System

The rating of each recipe depends on a detrimental metric that is calculated using :

• time without crossing
• time crossing and
• path length sum for both sticks

The calculation executed is as follows :
metric value = (time without crossing) + 2*(time crossing) + (path length)/(path length factor)

For each recipe we have set :

1. a maximum value for the metric and the corresponding rating(minimum rating)
2. a minimum for the metric and the corresponding rating(maximum rating)

To get the player's score we interpolating the metric value between the minimum and maximum rating.

Gallery