[Livestream] Nominee: Signal Decay

Presenting the 2020 IndieCade Nominees: Signal Decay

Signal Decay is a co-op stealth action roguelike emphasizing on communication and coordination set in a cyberpunk universe. Signal Decay is where XCOM meets Monaco: Players team up together to infiltrate enemy bases to destroy hypnotizing machines — Broadcasters, and leave the bases safely. Players also pilot a mothership around the world to customize their ops between missions.

Signal Decay is a strategy game in disguise. In each procedural mission, players encounter with a series of emergent problems. They must find a path to solve or avoid challenges to reach the goal, while collecting resources and information. With all the information shared in the top-down perspective, players have to not only master coordinated combat, but also manage information and time. From moment to moment, players should decide to stick together for imminent challenges or to separate in order to gain line of sights and explore the floor.

The weapons and gadgets that players equip with give players different abilities and actions. Each weapon and gadget functions in a unique way with different mechanics, e.g. shooting from behind, stunning, shielding, pushing, luring, detecting, operating, etc. These enable players to co-op in different ways. Players plan out a team attack based on their available actions and improvise when anything goes wrong. The ideal plans vary with different load-outs even under the same situation.

Between missions players pilot their mothership to find the next mission and make new weapons and gadgets on the tech tree to counter new enemies in the next mission. Each task takes time to complete. Players arrange the tasks in the timeline before arriving at the next mission. Because of permadeath, as pressure goes up when you go further and further in a run, the cooperative experience emerges in an even more intense way.