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.