Log #3: The waiting room

The waiting room will be the backdrop to the main game mechanism: This is where the patients will come each day to be screened. They sit in the waiting room, waiting to be sent into a diagnostics room. These rooms will, for example, be:

• General physical checkup - To get body temperature, pulse, blood pressure, reflexes etc.
• Talk to a nurse - To get a sense of the patient's state of mind, medical history etc.
• Tissue analysis / Bio lab - To check for clues in saliva or blood samples etc.
• X-ray - To look inside the patient for anomalies in bones or internal organs.
• Talk to a priest - To give the patient a possibility to confide about things they wouldn't tell a doctor.

The player sends a patient to a diagnostics room by dragging and dropping the patient there, and after a fixed amount of time, the patient returns to the waiting room with an updated chart. By looking in the chart, the player gets information to help them decide where to send the patient next, and at the end of the workday they hopefully have enough information to give a diagnosis.

My current thought is that the workday timer is paused when the player is checking a patient's chart, as well as when the player is looking up diseases in the grimoire. This way, the game doesn't require a certain reading speed for the player, while still forcing them to make fast decisions about where to send the patients.