Signal Decay was created for the ideal co-op experience I imagined. I explored creating an experience that connects one person to another in a gamy way — using mechanics as a main way to support the experience instead of the atmosphere formed by art and sound.
My initiative came from deliberate thoughts:
1. I didn’t consider co-op experience in team-based PVP games because I wasn’t much into PVP games. PVP is too much about egos, which is not good to cultivate co-op brotherhood.
2. I wanted a player to treat her teammate as a human-being rather than a tool. So there should agency in cooperating. On the contrary, I found co-op puzzle games doesn’t allow players to do anything that is not part of the solution. The same goes for fixed team roles each of which let players just do one thing essentially. I thought those turned out to be a bit shallow, and I wanted to go deeper to make a player really care another one and make decisions in coordination. So the “role” of each playaer should be ever-changing as the situation changes.
3. I hoped the game was accessible in a way unlike Diablo, in which if you don’t keep playing with your friends, your inventory and hero are left behind and you can’t enjoy the game together.
As Signal Decay is my solo project, many decisions of its direction came from my personal taste.
1. Permadeath raise the stakes as players go further, which makes the cooperation more important.
2. I wished the game makes sense in its narrative representation, so I chose stealth gameplay. It’s easier to remember and share a moment that makes sense in narrative. So there are a lot of “verbs” you could find in the mechanics, like assault, flee, steal, lure, stumbling into, etc.
3. I wanted to give players more agency so there’s a mothership part in which you can control the process of the ops.
