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  • The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Resonance

    by 
    Jessica Conditt
    Jessica Conditt
    07.25.2012

    Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Vince Wesselmann throws it back to an adventurous era with his point-and-click title, Resonance, which launched today on Steam at 10 percent off. What's your game called and what's it about?My labor of love is called Resonance. It's a point-and-click adventure game where you take control of four characters and their memories to work your way through a complex sci-fi mystery. A scientist has died after creating a terrible new technology and the race is on to secure his secret vault before the technology falls into the wrong hands. The player can use the unique short-term memory system to talk to any character in the game about practically anything you see. So you'll have to do some logical thinking to figure out how to navigate the game's tricky puzzles and twisty plot.What's the coolest aspect of Resonance?One of the unique features to this game is the Short-Term Memory system, which is tightly interwoven with the dialogue system. In most adventure games, when you talk to a character, you choose from a small selection of dialogue options the designer has chosen for you. Resonance has that as well, but it adds on the ability to "remember" any object you see in the game using your Short-Term Memory. You can then use these memories in conversation with any character in the game.Since the correct options are no longer served up on a silver platter, you'll have to think critically about which topics of conversation might help you in each situation. And with hundreds of possible objects to talk about, brute-forcing these solutions is right out the window. The window, by the way, can also be used as a Short-Term Memory in dialogue.