sebastianscaini 2026-04-20 23:53
The game has a lot of words suggested from LD participants, but I want to add more in a post-jam update!
Feel free to leave any words you want to have included in the comments here and I'll add them with that update!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Flag Fanatic
By sebastianscaini and del-nordlund
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 816 | 2.65 | 32 | |
| Fun | 832 | 2.22 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 594 | 3.08 | 32 | |
| Theme | 143 | 4.20 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 635 | 3.23 | 32 | |
| Humor | 457 | 2.66 | 26 | |
| Mood | 783 | 2.75 | 29 |
The game has a lot of words suggested from LD participants, but I want to add more in a post-jam update!
Feel free to leave any words you want to have included in the comments here and I'll add them with that update!
Good take on the theme and very inventive, the music is fun too and the graphics look great :D The game itself is very, VERY hard to play if you don't know flag semaphores. the fact that you can only click the Alphabet box (the ? in the top right) in between words makes it not that useful. I didn't get a single word without cheating (basically having two monitors and unity "pauses" the game when you stop focusing on the window)
The first words should be shorter and limited to a certain subset of letters. As it is, it doesn't teach so much as test if you know the entire semaphore
This could be a fun little edutainment sort of game. As it is, way too hard if you don't know semaphores already or don't pull up the meanings on another window. I believe having the alphabet visible while playing would not even make the game too easy, you'd still need to check them pretty fast and memorize the letters. Maybe there could then be a hard mode with the alphabet hidden? But it fits the theme well, the graphics are pretty and the music is fun and fitting.
Very educational. I suppose those are real signals ? Far too complexe for my tired brain but i like the idea a lot.
Had to put a cheat sheet to the side to play this :') But with that it was actually fun to search for the correct letter (as I alt-tabbed to stop the game from progressing). Maybe if I ever want to learn semaphore properly will I come back to this game.
this game is easily frustrating. The idea is very much on point with the theme and cleanly implemented, but there is no room for error and almost no room for you to improve, since you don't see the word at the end. Btw my first Word was like 9 letters and all after it were 4-5, is that supposed to happen?
Fun take on the theme! My best score was not very impressive - just 7 :sweat_smile: There was one small issue I've encountered. It seems like this letter is missing in the alphabet reference you've provided. From trial and error I assume it supposed to be H, but there is no combination of flag like this in the reference.
s4.jpg
@annie-owl oh shoot I did make an error on that one, it is indeed supposed to be H! I'm going to patch that later today since I think that counts as a typo fix.
The fix for the letter H is live now!
Cute take on the theme! But also a little brutal :) Even with the reference sheet open on the side, it's a bit hard to get started and it feels like sudden death if you miss one letter and then can't catch up for the rest of the word.
If this was meant to be a game to genuinely learn flag signals from scratch, then consider what language learning apps do -- start with a very limited vocabulary (or here, very limited set of letters), then repeat those multiple times with spaced repetition. When learning a new alphabet, the apps also just ask for individual letters instead of going straight to words.
I guess that's not a challenge for someone who already knows how to read flags ^^ But it could be a separate learning/tutorial mode.
I didn't even know Flag Semaphore was a thing. The main highlight is the theme. It’s obvious once you see how well the idea has been executed, but it’s hard to come up with in the first place. Well done :)
I like the idea of the game and the graphics are really nice. Unfortunaly I don't know any flag semaphore. Therefor I had a hard time playing it. It would have been nice if you would have picked a few letters and then taught the player these specific ones, before you went into the actual words. Now it felt like I went into hard mode without any knowlegde.
Screenshot_2.png
Even with a cheat sheet this game is extremely difficult!
I feel like I learned something today both about flag semaphore (I can remember a few letters without the chart now!) and about myself (I panic hard when a word has 7+ letters).
After about fifteen minutes my best score was a four. A lot of my successes were from figuring out a handful of letters throughout the word and then trying to fill in the rest. I could use some work!
Fun little educational tool. Would be good to have the answer after a failure just to know where it all went wrong.
I was wondering if I'd come across a signal flag game! Fun interpretation of the theme - I'm _extremely_ bad at it, but was neat to stare at the tutorial for a while and try to learn something :sweat_smile:
ohh I love how you made an edutainment game to learn about actual flag signals. It's definitely difficult if you've never done it before. Might be too much for a jam game, but I think it would be good to add some sort of tutorial in the beginning, where a few flags are introduced with hints on what they mean. For example, you could have it spell out "flag" and put F L A G below the signals, then make another word with these same signals, like "lag". Every time a new letter is introduced, it could show a hint. Always tricky to make an edutainment game simple enough, fun, and still teach you something :)
The first word it gave me was FLAG FANATIC apparently, and uhhhhhhhh EXACTLY what I look for in a game about semaphores, which I don't tend to look for unfortunately. Interesting concept and I can appreciate the gusto/vibe of the game itself; semaphomaniacs (is that the term?) wouldn't seem to do things by halves, not like those timid morse codets. Your target audience (which I cannot count myself among) would really appreciate what you've done here.
Definitely covers a niche ha! I know very little about flag semaphores and could have benefited with a more gradual difficulty curve (show a picture of a cat and have the flags spell cat, then dog, then slowly start removing images and hints). The game is adorable and I can tell a lot of love was put into it.
Game is tough! but unique concept, well done completing it for the Jam
Good that I have second display for the signal's chart 😅
Oooh, another semaphore flag game!
But as others have mentioned, it's way too hard. :laughing: You have a picture here on this LD-page of all the flag-combinations, but it would have been nice to have this in-game too. And also start with shorter words. Not only do I have to decipher the letters, but also remember the letters. I would have liked to be able to type along while watching the flags.
It would also have been nice to add an auto-focus to the place where you need to type, so that the player doesn't need to click it before typing. Sending the word with enter would also feel logical.
With a couple of tries it did get a bit better, and while having the cheat sheet on one side and the game on the other, I got:
flagfanatic.png
After getting so far, I found out that the games stops if I click the other tab. If I would play like this, I would have as much time as I want to think :smile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIMEPPZxzyg
I really like the commitment of writing most things in the game using semaphores!
I love that you have gone for a edutainment game, kudos for that. I would suggest to maybe start out with just remembering single letters to start, just so people can get the hang of single semaphores without trying to translate 4 or 5 within a couple seconds, then you could go onto filling in the gaps where certain letters of a word has been replaced with a semaphore. Then you go into full words. With that said I did enjoy this one. I started writing the semaphores down as they popped up and then translating so now my notebook is covered in chicken scratch :laughing:. Nice work and I look forward to seeing where this game will go.
Very creative and educational take on the theme! I didn’t know much about flag semaphore before playing, so the concept felt really fresh and interesting. The visuals are cute, and the music gives it a fun energy.
It is quite difficult for beginners, so a slower tutorial mode with single letters or shorter words first would help a lot.