Hi,
I'm a proffesional video-game developer and I'm currently working on a up-coming adventure-game with similar style to Heavy Rain,
The screenplay is near finished now but there's one section which I've post-poned until now because it requires a understanding of chemistry which I don't have.
Basically in one chapter of the story the hero is on a prison island similar to Alcatraz, he needs to escape so he hears that the island used to be a military fort before it was a prison and that it's rumoured that in the ruined basement of the abandoned fort there's a secret tunnel to the mainland, but as the hero finally gets down here he discovers that there are other cons who has escaped down here to use it as their drug-lab, and thus your main enemy for this chapter is a evil drug-chemist (all you chemists are a bit evil).
Chemistry has a bit of overall relevance in the story since the former police-officer you play as was never able to join the CSI-team because of constantly failing at all the chemistry tests.
There's one situation down in this basement where you need to put one of the drugged-out test-subjects to sleep to get past him (the door to the secret tunnel is in his cell), but rather than just simply going to the lab and picking up a anaesthetic pill and throwing it in the test-suspects dog-bowl (he's addicted to drugs so he'll swallow any drug you put in there) I thought it would be interesting if the chemist is all out of anaesthetic drugs so you have to create one yourself!
first of all because I like it when games have educational puzzels rather than just abstract ones,
but also because I want the chemist to think that you simply gave the test-suspect one of his death-pills, so when the chemist then stops you with his gun as you are about to go out the tunnel he is really suprised when you say that you didn't kill him, you only putt him to temporary sleep, realizing that he's standing with his back to the person he has been torturing with experiments with for so long just before he is ripped to shredds.
So in other words what I need is:
1) a name/recipe for a real anaesthetic pill that is being used down here in this basement. (the test-subspect is violent like a zombie because of his drugs so you can't go close enough to give him a injection or gas so it should preferibly be a pill because those you can simply throw in his dog-bowl)
2) one which creating is of decent fun/simplicity in a adventure-game and of somewhat realism that he is able to get ahold of the ingredients in this prison/fort-basement.
The potential source of materials/tools are:
a) stuff that's been left there since the old fort, so the evil-chemist has probably looted enough stuff to build him a lab of sort. (tho puzzels are more fun the more you have to explore the whole basement to find needed ingredients)
b) stuff that has been smuggled in, during your path of finding to the underworld you discovered the person who are smuggling objects to the basement in exchange for exclusive right to sell their drugs.
c) natural stuff found on an island, for exampel I saw on wikipedia that chloroform can be made by seaweed and it would be somewhat plausible that you would find seaweed in the sewers as high waves from the oceans coudl have washed some into the sewers-system. (I like these natural ingredients since it makes it feel less abstract to those who don't know chemistry)
My current rough idea is:
In the scientists lab you find a empty bowl of anaesthetic chloroform pills but a recepie for them:
*Acetone: you already have since you picked up the smuggled goods.
*Bleach: you already have since you picked up the smuggled goods.
*Ice: found naturally somewhere in this frosted cold basement.
*Glassware & seperation-funnel: already in the chemists lab.
and you make it:
*Add bleach to glass.
*Add ice to glass.
*Add acetone to glass.
*Add ice to glass.
*Wait for settle (automatic).
*Use seperation funnel on glass. (to get the pure chloroform).
*Add into pill-cap (however it is that's done)
but:
a) Can chloroform be taken as pill? if not then the whole chloroform idea won't work. i.e. would a pill-cap with chlorine swallowed make you instantly subconcious?
b) There may be many other more interesting drug receips that I'm missing out on, so please if you know any please mention them (even if they seem slightly less entertaining) and I can determine if that would be better or not
(as I can't write the whole story there may be other recipes that contains a certain ingrediense which you already have or know where they are that I just didn't have time to mention in this little post, so another recepie you may find to be only decent may work perfect when combined with other elements of this story)