MICRODOZE (ΜΙΧΡΟΔΟΖΕ)
Synopsis
The game is a collection of wacky and playful environments. Each has its own set of challenges.
Our primary protagonists are silly, carefree fraternity brothers on a quest for fun. They live together in their frat house and share a close bond.
The game begins when one housemate offers everyone a mystical object, promising a good time. The brothers take a bite, but nothing happens. So, they eat the whole thing. Suddenly, they are hit with a wave of hunger. They spot the fridge and think, “You know what sounds good right now? Ice cream.” Together, they walk to the fridge. One of them opens the freezer, and suddenly, they all feel woozy. Where are they? They’ve been transported into an icy world—the inside of their freezer. And that ice cream they craved? It’s not happy to be eaten, and now it’s out for revenge.
Each environment is a wild manifestation of the brothers’ magical journey. Completing the challenge in one area unlocks the next, triggered by the brothers’ reactions. For example, after the freezer episode, a freaked-out brother might try to throw the ice cream away. Suddenly, they all tumble into a landfill world, facing a new landfill themed boss to defeat.
In the present day the game takes place over the course of a single night for these brothers, ending when the effects of the mystical objects wear off.
Tone
This is a game about delightfully unhinged hunger. We want players to feel what it’s like to trip face first into a surreal freezer dimension while chasing the one thing that matters: ice cream. Tonally, the game lives at the intersection of psychedelic euphoria and snack-fueled exploration. It’s an adventure on the search of dopamine that leans into absurdity without ever losing its heart. We can understand it through three core feelings:
Euphoric: The world of the freezer isn’t cold and dead—it’s electric. Every snowflake glistens with flavor, every frozen food item pulses with possibility. We want players to experience delight, to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness around them while still feeling the craving that drives them forward. This is what microdosing feels like in the best-case scenario: pure, exciting wonder.
Psychedelic: Nothing is quite what it seems. We want to throw assumptions about the natural world as we know it as we step into a place crafted by the brain’s silliest imaginations. Colors melt, time warps, objects behave in unexpected ways. Physics are just suggestions. The trip offers a dreamscape where common places become portals, platforms, or enemies. The visuals should feel surreal, vibrant, and kaleidoscopic.
Rowdy: Inspired by the chaos of games like Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and Ice Rage, we want the gameplay to feel like a wacky competition between best friends. There’s stumbling, slipping, yelling, and sudden victory. Whether players are speedrunning a level or trying to beat a ridiculous boss, it should feel like couch co-op energy even when played solo. It’s silly, a bit goofy, and really, really fun.
We want our game to be trippy, but never grim; absurd, but not random; stupid, but smart about it. Like a party game your subconscious invented while craving snacks!
Setting
This game will take place at a small college in the outskirts of the bright and beautiful city of San Francisco, California. At the college, it is Springtime, and the beginning of rush season for the fraternities, and our user will be a pledge who is trying to earn their rank within this fraternity. In terms of weather, it’ll be bright and warm outside with blooming flowers, but inside the frat house, a whole new setting will transpire.
The frat house is a creaky Victorian style house, dirtied and cramped with half finished projects, neon party lights, old pizza boxes, overflowing trash, unclaimed clothes, and empty beer cans. The setting can be visualized to have the smell of dried up alcohol and stale pizza. This frat house will serve as the central node for the rest of our settings.
Every ordinary object here doubles as a dimensional gateway once a psychedelic kicks in. Opening the freezer door will prompt the user to be whisked into a crystalline food kingdom, controlled by Popsicle Warriors. Emptying out the overflowing trash can will transport the user into a fiery landfill world. In this setting, anything could prompt the transition into a multiverse of new worlds where the physics, the setting, the tone, the vibe, the mood could all be different.
Mood
We want the mood of our game to feel positively confusing. The very rules of the universe will be bending around the player, but we want this happening in a way that is extraordinary and never dark. As mentioned above, the game should feel absurd, but never grim. Every setting will have a different mood. The frat house will be dim and puzzling; the freezer icy and surreal; etc. Yet despite all the different settings, one thing will be constant: enough delirium to make the game pop, while not going too far in the other direction. The player will be tripping, but never losing themselves.
Gameplay
For the sake of this class, we are so far only planning on building out one of these imagined subareas, specifically the frat’s freezer. Inside, one will fight to get to the back of the freezer against a progressively scaling enemy:
Pictured is a rendition of this animatronic Ice-Cream carton who is launching barrages of hockey pucks at the player. This boss might be a typical 3-phase boss, but we are also experimenting with creating a dynamically scaling set of enemies and using more rogue-like mechanics to also scale the player’s abilities. Similar to those mobile games where you collect power-ups to fend off a horde of approaching enemies, we wanted to do something similar that plays on our themes. We are thinking that there will be a combination of projectiles that you want to hit back to damage the enemies, and some that harm the player and need to be dodged. The power-ups that scale the player’s abilities are more drug-themed objects that use drug terms to describe their benefits (e.g., time dilation, munchies, paranoia, ego death) , but might also cause more nausea. So all in all, what we hope this slice will look like is a physics-based hockey game with 2-dimensional controls, where the players can collect more hallucinogenic-themed power-ups to effectuate their win against these fantastical villains in the frat freezer.
Tone References
The central influences for this game are the slapstick absurdity and colorful chaos of party games, the surreal dream logic of trippy animation, and the deep camaraderie found in stories about tight-knit groups thrown into ridiculous situations. Tonally, the game blends high-energy silliness with psychedelic unpredictability and a strong undercurrent of warmth between its core characters.
Games
- Ice Rage
- Mario Galaxy
- Super Smash Bros
- Fall guys
- Katamari Damacy
Movies and TV Shows
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Everything everywhere all at once
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
- Rick and Morty
- Adventure Time
- Regular Show
Music
- Video game adventures: Club Penguin dojo music, Mother Earth’s Plantasia
- Psychedelic and surreal: Tame Impala, MGMT’s Electric Feel, Jhene Aiko’s Sativa
- Hyperpop: Sophie, 100gecs, horsegiirL
We are also planning on using a low-pass filter during dialogue and in the main menu screen so that the music isn’t too loud and it emulates what it feels like hearing a rager going on from outside.
Key Challenges for Design
One of our key challenges for the design is that our game is currently structured to be a lot of disconnected mini games. And so it’s super important that we weave A clear connection between the story of our game, the setting of our game, the activities of our game, and the purpose of our game. Furthermore, we need to also design the physics that we would like to have in our game. There needs to be some sort of reasonable skill depth that enables people to learn how to play the game and succeed in it, but not be too difficult so that that’s impossible or too easy so that it’s not fun.
Key Challenges for Tech
Building upon the key challenges for design, one of our biggest challenge for tech will be defining and creating the exaggerated physics throughout the minigames. For example, we want to have some sort of ice drift feature where the slippery level that users experience in certain game modes increase or change over time, impacting the way users can move. Furthermore, we discussed having variable gravity in one of the games, and so thinking about how gravity affects the objects that we are intending it to affect and how that impacts the playability will be a technical challenge. Also, what do the seamless portal transitions look like? Will this be an online platform with co-op play? How do we plan to blend tracks together in response to the player state? There will be several technical gaps that we have to overcome, but these are great challenges that we’re all excited to tackle.
Key Challenges for Art
Visually, we have several different art fantasies we’re considering — a frozen world, a fiery landfill, an arcade, dirty frat house, etc…— and yet all of these different art visualizations should read as one single universe, while portraying some sort of psychedelic experience. We will have to be intentional about the ways we are saturating our images or outlining objects or having specific shapes or contrast or glows in order to create some sort of uniformed experience despite the different settings that we will be transporting our user through.
Who is this for?
This is a game for people in search of bright, playful, and joyful experiences to be shared in the company of others.
Microdoze is designed for those who want to unwind, experiment, and enjoy the unpredictable energy of group play. While there are bosses to defeat and challenges to overcome, the emphasis is less on competition or mastery and more on the shared chaos and laughter that come from working together.
The spirit of the game is lighthearted and social. Success is measured not by high scores or serious victories, but by the sense of camaraderie and the fun of facing absurd situations as a team. Microdoze is for anyone who appreciates silly surprises, enjoys the messiness of collaboration, and wants a break from games that take themselves too seriously.
If you’re looking for a game that delivers a sense of togetherness, celebrates the joy of collective achievement, and leaves you feeling lighter, Microdoze is made for you.
