paradramorama/DESIGN.md

PARADRAMORAMA — design

Lineage

Ranarama (Graftgold 1987) had three great ideas and shipped two of them:

1. One resource is everything — Power was health, ammo and fuel at once.
2. Context switching under pressure — twitch action interrupted by a timed logic duel (the anagram, lifted from Paradroid's transfer game).
3. Weakness as camouflage — Mervyn survived the massacre because warlocks ignored a harmless frog. The game never used this. Enemies attacked the frog anyway. The best idea in the premise sat unused for 39 years.

Paradroid (same developer) had the idea Ranarama dropped: you don't kill what you beat in the minigame — you take its body, and the body decays, forcing a chain of hijacks.

PARADRAMORAMA fuses all four: possession chain + decaying bodies + live duels

• weakness-as-camouflage, skinned as audio because the thing everyone remembers about Ranarama is the garbled digitised voice on the title screen.

Pillars

• The world never pauses. 1987 froze the game for the duel sub-screen. We run the duel picture-in-picture while your helpless real body stands in a live room. That's the whole modernisation in one sentence.
• Your body is a countdown. Health = ammo = disguise timer. Every decision is "spend the body or save it".
• Loud is strong and strong is loud. Gain scales damage AND aggro. There is no silent power option.
• Audio is mechanics, not garnish. The duel is audible (two oscillators beating against each other as you tune in). The floor's drone is the map state — dissonant while infested, resolves to a major chord when cleansed.

The two-sided food chain

	sees bare Signal	sees possessed body
Hardware	no — you're line noise	yes, once you make noise
Static	yes — hunts you	no — ignores machines

Bare = safe from guns, hunted by gremlins. Possessed = safe from gremlins, at war with guns. There is no fully safe state. This is the frog insight, finally load-bearing.

Entities (slice roster)

Unit	HP	Role
Signal (you)	3 coherence	fast, unarmed, invisible to hardware
Static	1	gremlin, spawned by amps, hunts bare signals, interrupts duels
AMP (spawner)	8	stationary nest, not possessable, drops charge pickups
DRUM	5	possessable. Fires quantised bursts on the global 112 BPM clock
SYNTH	7	possessable. Charge-and-release heavy orb, filter-sweep voice
SAMP (post-slice)	6	captures the last projectile that hit it, fires copies back

Possession duel (the Warlock fight, modernised)

• Trigger: bare signal touches active hardware.
• PiP panel opens; game keeps running. Your signal stands frozen and vulnerable at the machine — a static hit mid-duel = instant fail + damage.
• Mechanic (slice): tune-to-lock. Target tone plays; you sweep your oscillator W/S in log-frequency space; within ±6% a lock meter fills (~1s of continuous hold); leave tolerance and it drains. 5s total timer. You tune by EAR as much as by eye — the beat-frequency between the two oscillators disappears as you converge.
• Fail/timeout: 1 coherence damage, knockback, 2s lockout on that target.
• Post-slice: duel minigame varies by hardware family — beat-match for drums (nudge a drifting metronome into phase), pitch for synths, a gain-ride (keep a jumping fader inside a moving sweet spot) for amps if we make them possessable, and a scratch duel via the scratchlab worklet engine as the boss variant.

Decay economy

Drain	Cost
passive decay, any body	0.35 HP/s
DRUM shot (auto, per 8th note held)	0.18 HP
SYNTH orb	0.4 + 0.8×gain HP
body destroyed while worn	eject + 1 coherence + stun
voluntary eject (E)	free; husk keeps remaining HP, decays 0.8 HP/s, re-enter without duel

Gain: hold fire to ramp 0→1. Damage scales with gain. Each shot adds noise; noise decays slowly; aggro radius = 240px + noise×700px. Max noise = the whole revealed floor knows where you are.

Charge pickups (amp kills always, hardware kills 30%): +2.5 integrity to a worn body, or +1 coherence when bare.

Anti-softlock: if amps remain but no possessable hardware exists, the system dispatches a repair DRUM from a living amp every few seconds. You can always claw back a body.

Win state

Floor cleansed = every amp and every machine dead (the body you're wearing counts as cleansed — walk it home). Statics pop with the last amp. The dissonant drone (detune scales with enemies remaining) resolves to a major add9 pad and the floor shifts deep blue — Ranarama's victory colour, kept.

Roadmap

1. This slice — one floor, DRUM/SYNTH/AMP/static, tune-duel, full loop.
2. Floors 2–8 with descent glyph, per-floor palette + drone key change.
3. SAMP body + per-family duel minigames.
4. Build-crafting between floors: spend "kernel shards"—no. Spend patch cables: route body mods (eject refunds integrity as a stun burst, gain ramps faster but caps noise higher, husks don't decay...).
5. Scratch duel boss on the worklet engine. Digitised voice taunts, PARADRAMORAMA garble as the boss language.