After being pushed into a state of loseitude for two weeks by exams and all-nighters on school work, I have been clawing my way out of the inactivity abyss. On my way up, I thought fervently about a better title for Signal.

I decided that Resonance was a more fitting title, but I’ll probably change that again as I make more progress.

I’ve also come up with a semi-interesting way to do Resonance’s story. The main player is typical person, no real special powers or something. Then he and a few allies are assaulted by some monster thing. The player defeats it, but then an explosion occurs which propels an antenna tower into him, pinning him to a transformer, and impaling him and destroying him entirely. Several communications towers across the world no longer “work” after this.

The player is somehow given a second chance to live as a magical electrical field thing that has the deceased hero’s form. He initially gains an armored suit in order to disguise his appeareance because he is, by all human accounts, dead. The player is only kept alive by being in close proximity to at least one beacon (that is “broken” by human standards because they no longer transmit communications - but resonate with our player) AND a finite “health” meter.

Initially, things like metallic objects and thunderstorms, adveresly impact the hero by forcibly pulling him along them and getting damaged upon reaching an end. Thunderstorms would displace the player and be near-lethal. Stuff like maybe railroad tracks would “teleport” the player all the way to the other end of the track. Later on, these things will have no effect on the player, but initially, it would help to constrain the player’s exploration in order to teach them some things about the gameplay and it could also make for some interesting story sequences!

The player is motivated by a mixture of causes, but prevailingly a desire to return to natural human form and to explore the scientific mystery they’ve become. Eventually, the player will be capable of returning to their initial human state, but things won’t be the way they were, people will move on, and the player will realize essentially how weak they are outside of their “resonant” form.

In addition, various nit-picky art fixes were made, and I’m still not satisfied. But I may as well just move on for now and animate the damn thing:

Lastly, I made a textbox! A very sexy textbox. Check it out:

Here’s this week’s build, so you can see it in action, and most importantly, hear the really horrible punchline!

Now I’m off. Look forward to more posts hopefully, because the holidays are typically rather boring. Das ist alles.

Tags: art, gruedorf, resonance