Realignment by Mediflect
A narrative game about an "unstable" AI and the repair drone sent to fix it. Use your ears to solve tasks by listening to dissonant chordal hums, which resolve harmoniously as you approach the correct alignment. Determine the fate of your discordant patient.
Available for browser play here: https://mediflect.itch.io/realignment
Controls
- Movement: WASD
- Tasks: Mouse
Theme
The game tackles the theme of instability in two ways:
1. Dissonant chord resolution. AKA the first idea I had when I saw the prompt. Here comes a little music theory.
Dissonant chords are inherently unstable, and want to resolve to consonant chords. In the task minigames, the chord hum starts off dissonant, but fades into a resolved tonic chord as the player approaches the solution.
All the sounds in the game are based on the key of A major. When the chord hums in the minigames resolve, they always go to a root-position A major chord, which harmonizes with the background music. That's because the music is also heavily based on A major chord tones. It all just sorta resonates together.
In a smaller way, the character voice tones are also related to the key. The Curator's speaks in the note E, the fifth scale degree in A major, which tends to sound cold and distant. The AI on the other hand speaks in the note Bb, the flat second of A major, which clashes with the other sounds for a more dissonant feel.
2. Narrative themes. AKA the story is literally about a character who is deemed unstable.
The game features dialog between two characters. The first is the "unstable" AI that the player is trying to fix, and the second is the monitoring system the directs the player on their task. Not much more to say about this; just play the game and see for yourself.
~~Also shoutout to Intellisense in VSCode; I swear to god it can't resolve over half of the package namespaces I need to use and it makes coding such a giant pain and AAAAAAAAAAAAAA~~
Screenshots
Credits
Engineering, design, and writing were all done by me (Mediflect).
Nicholas Black contributed the music for the interactive portion of the game. All other sound design was done by me.
All textures used were open-licensed or public domain. The font is Share Tech Mono, which is licensed under the Open Font License. All other sprites and graphics were created by me or used with permission.
Special thanks to Michael Savage-Benoist for Unity consulting and playtesting!
Tools used: Unity 2021, Photoshop CC 2019, Cubase Elements 10 (sound design), Logic Pro (music), Audacity, Visual Studio Code
| Link | https://mediflect.itch.io/realignment |
| Link | https://github.com/Mediflect/realignment |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/realignment |
Ratings
| Overall | 100th | 4.11⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 414th | 3.71⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 399th | 3.63⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 256th | 4.05⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 671th | 3.7⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 22th | 4.33⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 303th | 3.663⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 47th | 4.3⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 80🗨️ |
Short of producing more content (I really liked the game), I think character (visual) design was probably the weakest part of the experience, as Perry doesn't really have a lot of identifying features (their silhouette is a sphere). The graphics are by no means bad, but the design could be better. Could also maybe add some character animation, like blinking Perry's 'eye' / idle animations, could help sell investment in the character more.
One thing I'd like to throw out there is that there are in fact two different endings, in case anyone is willing to play through the game a second time. I wanted to add a button to the credits so you could get to the other ending more easily, but I ran out of time.
I also just added a link to the source code at the bottom of the page, in case anyone is curious.
@misterpapi I'm so happy you appreciated the musical interpretation on the theme! The chord resolutions were actually the very first thing I made, before I even started on the code.
@gryhyphen I appreciate the detailed feedback! I agree that the character design isn't very strong. Your suggestions are great and I'll keep them in mind for future projects.
(I setup a lot of the linting / editor support for my team)
If that isn't the issue, then idk, must be something else. Maybe also try regenerating the project files in unity (making sure the editor is set to vscode so it regens things for vscode).
To be on par with the visual studio for unity workflow, you may also want to install these Roslyn analyzers too (tho last I checked vs code didn't support supressors / you needed to enable a feature flag, so it will require some config stuff that I will leave as an exercise to the reader :P):
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/other/unity#_enabling-unity-warnings
https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers
Feedback: the shape toggle puzzle was the first I walked to and was the least clear. I thought I had to come back until I realized via another puzzle that I just need to make it blue. The dialogue is also a little long in places - I was solving the next thing before they could finish talking. I would also have loved the ability to load my save and restart to see the other ending - as it stands the walking around was too long to play again.
Firstly, the dialogs are superb and really make the game. I played it twice through to get both endings and really enjoyed the process.
I felt really immerged by the text only screens, they worked really well. The sound component was a nice touch, but I relied mostly on the background color to solve the riddles. Could have been further explored maybe.
I also saw an egg and a red body.
Well done!
Honenstly an amazing entry
multiple resolutions with different outcomes, with like a jazz ending or a minor ending depending on how you chose to resolve the chords. Very neat little game and had a real atmosphere to it
also, i love how deep into music theory you went with this game! i can't say the mini games were particularly fun on their own, but it was really relaxing to hear the discordant tones resolve, and if they were too engage i'd miss the dialogue, so it made an overall very serene little journey.
i of course took the obvious route at the end, i was half-expecting the AI to sort of turn on me at the last minute, which... kinda happened?
And I thought there was good zen vibes
The story wasn't innovative, but you narrated it very well; i love Sen's humor!
Good job guys!
Graphics were spartan, but worked. I liked the story & how it was revealed through dialogue.
Glad I had the chance to check this out!
Oh yes, I am so bad
Graphics is awesome. I liked that cartoon style very much
Minigames: I wonder when did you have time to add minigames apart from the main gameplay? Probably, there is not much of the main gameplay? Nevertheless, I liked playing your game. It looks pretty much finished, the only thing - I didn't find a button to Restart. Wanted to finish the game with a good end
Story is nice as pointed by others. Sometimes I stopped playing just to read the dialog
Very cool game, I like it!
I didn't like the AI, though. I thought it needed to learn some empathy. Like, I didn't want to be called Perry! It can't just name me! It should have tried to figure out how to listen to me and ask me if I liked my name. Though I couldn't speak, maybe I could have moved in a certain way to communicate. So I shut it down :P
||tbh I picked to download the AI because I thought it would turn evil or something but I liked the ending a lot! Now I want to know what happens if you reboot||