Overview
Signal Decay was formerly named Saviors, Squad Of Saviors. It came on Steam Early Access on Sep.20, 2019.
Saviors is a cooperative tactical shooter set in a future dystopia. You and your teammate are the only humans not controlled by a radical organization that uses mind-control technology. A computer terminal calls on you to save the world.
Saviors is XCOM meets Monaco, focusing on player communication and coordination. Together you infiltrate military bases to destroy mind control machines. Try to get to and destroy the machine and escape before enemy reinforcements arrive. Each mission creates uncertain and varied situations. Unlockable equipment lets you customize your gameplay, and your decisions in the operations drive the story to different endings.
Check the wiki to learn more about the design aspect of the game.
Links:
Saviors was my solo MFA thesis at NYU Game Center.
Design Intention
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 systemic 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:
-
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 foster co-op brotherhood.
-
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. I took a systemic approach by making a system that constantly yields dangerous situations where a player will need a hand of another, and strategies built on trust are the most effective. In the dynamics, the “role” of each player is ever-changing as the situation changes. (In hindsight, this causes unsmooth heuristics in early game as the player always tends to solve a problem alone when there seem to be chances, especially to core gamers. So tutorialization and tweaking the early content become crucial.)
-
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.
-
Permadeath raises the stakes as players go further, which makes the cooperation more important.
-
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.
-
I wanted to give players more agency so there’s a mothership part in which you can control the process of the ops, giving you an illusion of a dynamic world.
