FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD59 → INTERSIGNAL

INTERSIGNAL

By zimny11 and kanagg

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4543.5426
Fun4723.3025
Innovation2203.7125
Theme2674.0025
Graphics3953.8025
Audio3363.5025
Mood5003.5025

Comments

rezonanc 2026-04-20 19:32

nice art and audio, but i dont understand what i need to do. tutorial text is hard to understand. game is looking smart

isaac-hisey 2026-04-20 19:39

Same here, I like the audio design and the art. I got 19 blue score. I'm not sure if I'm winning or losing or doing things right or wrong. I figured out a workflow for dumping grays into the bottom left to get new signals and I just kinda started focusing on blues. It was neat.

lcstark 2026-04-21 16:12

Pretty cool concept! It took me a moment to wrap my head around it, but since it is pretty intuitive, it didn't take long. At first I played in the default zoomed-out view, which made the font on stellar objects unreadable, but thanks to some nice colour-coding it wasn't difficult to figure out what they meant.

screen.png

After several games, best score I got was 19. It would have been 20, but I had a red signal left over from noise conversion that I had to use, and it destroyed one of my blue nodes. Shame I couldn't just discard it, but oh well, such are the rules of the game. ;)

Art-wise, it's a really pretty game! I love the three scannable objects, seeing them made me wish for some larger exploration or strategy game where you'd be able to see more of them around. ;) The interface is pretty good looking too. Even though it's just moving a couple of signal nodes around, it gives you the feeling of operating a larger electro-mechanical machine, full of dials and switches.

The only thing that felt off a bit was the two animations on the data analyser - connection between the two top-left nodes and connection between the two bottom-right ones. It kinda made me think there might be some sort of mechanic to gain bonus points from having both nodes be of the same colour, or specifically two blue ones in case of the top one and two yellows (or maybe red-yellow?) in bottom ones. It felt appropriate, given the colour-coding of the signals, so there was a bit of confusion with that.

Sound design is pretty nice too. I like the discreet space ambient tune in the background.

Oh, and there we go. As I was writing this post, I've managed to beat my record. :D

screen2.png

I better stop now, I'd like to rate some other games as well. But yeah, definitely well done!

frogravity 2026-04-21 20:13

Couldn't beat LCStark's score, but pretty proud of what I managed nonetheless :) aa.png

Anyway, this was fun! Took me a bit of time to get used to it, but once things clicked, they were very fun! I especially enjoyed gradually discovering strategies, such as intentionally keeping the three-noise-generated signal as backup for only when I absolutely needed it or intentionally placing noise signals to move the cursor one step despite it reducing score in order to match up the rest of the signals (initially I didn't understand why was that even possible). I also found the star balance being pretty interesting, with blue being very rare (and thus valuable) compared to something like yellow, which could be increased pretty easily.

I did find the RNG pretty frustrating here, though. Maybe I'm just bad at it, but it always felt like I hit an unlucky streak eventually resetting my existing signals or (more often) just not getting enough of a color. One attempt, I spent pretty much the entire game using only the pulsar and trying to maximize blue, yet still got under 20 of it in the end! I'm not sure how one would solve it - if there's not enough the game becomes too deterministic/easily solved, I know - but right now it felt like I was more hoping for good RNG than strategizing :(

Nevertheless, I still had fun, and played it for half a dozen attempts or so! The ambience was nice and I really liked the planets in the computer screen too. The UI was surprisingly intuitive once it clicked, but I wish it was a bit cleaner where you're at at times (eg. your current cursor location being more visible, perhaps showing where will it land when highlighting a new signal instead of having to constantly count tiles, displaying your current scores at all time etc.). Overall though, again, I enjoyed it! Very nice entry!

colisan 2026-04-24 19:49

firefox_2026-04-24_21-46-35.png

Awesome entry! My first game was super bad, but then it clicked and I had fun replaying it for several tries! Makes me feel stupid, but in a good way :joy: I like that the random element is dealt to you and you choose how you handle it, it feels great to overcome a seemingly-bad rng :sparkles:

wallted 2026-04-27 00:34

Great game - I liked this quite unique concept and it is complicated enough that if you play few times, you learn something new how this behaves. I love space and I am fond of how these astronomical bodies turned out looking through the screen. Neat, polished game for with complete, fun mechanic. Perfect entry guys!

intersignal.png

atmospherium 2026-04-27 15:56

This started off feeling very trial-and-error to me, but crossed over into "I can solve this" pretty quickly. Took a few passes to get the hang of this, but ended up with a final score of 23. Nice combination of mechanics, there was usually SOMETHING I could do to not negatively impact my score too much. Nice art and presentation, everything felt clear and engaging. Nice work.

justking144 2026-05-04 17:19

I appreciated the tutorial but the explanations still left me feeling a bit confused and could've been worded better and/or included screenshots of the game to better clarify things

galareteg 2026-05-04 21:00

It was quite confusing at the start, but once I got the hang of it, it became really fun. I like this concept a lot and the graphics are so nice. The audio is also good, I found the beeps and boops very satisfying. Great idea executed really well. The only thing I could complain about is the tutorial being a wall of text, but it wasn't that big of a deal, and I figured it out quickly anyway.

turbolaser 2026-05-05 15:31

The game looked complicated at first glance, but it was actually quite easy to get into. A nice mathematical puzzle with beautiful presentation. I would have preferred a mode that shows the totals for each color, since having to recalculate them pulled me out of the flow a bit.

unreststudio 2026-05-06 12:41

Nice graphics and sound design :) Gameplay was a bit hard to understand at first though!

wizard 2026-05-06 17:18

Looks and sounds beautiful, however I couldn't quite understand how things worked, I appreciate the tutorial but for me it was still a bit too complicated to understand, a walkthrough would have been helpful. I can see what you were going for, it just didn't click for me. but, as I said it looks and sounds amazing. Just because I didn't "get it", I don't want that to come off a being bad, well done.

mashedpotato 2026-05-06 21:02

Very cool puzzle game! Took me a round to take in the rules of the game, but I liked it. I think the mechanics are very balanced and supporting different strategies. Played several rounds!

freamdev 2026-05-07 15:31

Very cool game, took about 4 rounds to figure out what the buttons do but after that it was fun. Surprised how such a simple idea can be made into something fun/complex.

itero-proto 2026-05-07 15:50

I didn't understand anything, and yes, I didn't read the guide 🙄

rewzu 2026-05-07 18:53

Took me a second to get started but the game seems quite original and makes nice use of the theme! Good entry! :D

anaastaska 2026-05-07 19:32

I needed some time to understand what I should do but after it it was really great! I love puzzles and this one is really interesting. Love audio❤️

vicebrother 2026-05-07 23:49

the graphics are so cool

jk5000 2026-05-08 17:36

For me the rules was too complex. But I liked the visuals and games atmosphere. Overall a very well made game. Well done.

anszwa 2026-05-08 19:46

It also took me a while to understand what the goal was, but its a really good idea. Respect for the amount of content you managed to create in such a short time. The user interface has a very cool style!

rongo-matane 2026-05-08 21:47

Not the greatest score, but for a first try it was not bad. Unbenannt.png

I enjoyed the puzzle system, really nice game that makes you think. I had one round with 5 grey noises that felt unfair. Getting into the game was not too easy because there is a lot in the screen going on that has no meaning and there is no immediate feedback what is interactable. For example, when i hover over a planet it should light up so i understand what i can click.

I did see the tutorial and read it, and liked that it was my choice to open the tutorial. I think it could be good to first start with the goal of the game and then go into how you achieve it. Not sure though. The marker which tile is currently active in the color wheel could be clearer. I sometimes was not 100% sure what tile it was. You could also draw a little arrow to the input box that you need to click after selecting a noise, such that the arrow would only show up once you selected a noise. That would guide me better through the process. I think many people will skip the tutorial and not understand the game, but you can alleviate this a lot by making the game easier to understand on a UI/UX level.

One thing that was a bit crazy is that the game launched really small and i accidentally found out that you can zoom in. No game ever did that to my knowledge, both a bit funny but also i wonder why :D

I took two or three turns to figure it all out, and then i really had fun and was engaged. The descriptions and design was clear enough to not get frustrating. The #1 improvement that would also be quite easy would be UI responsiveness/feedback on what is interactable. Really cool game as usual :)

2026-05-09 07:18

Firstly, the setting of the story is very complete and interesting. Secondly, I really like the space-themed art style of this work. It has a pixel-like style but is very suitable for this theme, giving off a deliberate aged look. Great!