tolviere 2026-04-21 02:45
I wish I took a picture of my final set of words! I love this idea so much! It's such a great twist on these language games. The art is crazy good as well.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Operation Alien Translation
By sheepolution, shores and Lazarus Richardson
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 13 | 4.36 | 50 | |
| Fun | 26 | 4.18 | 51 | |
| Innovation | 31 | 4.25 | 50 | |
| Theme | 67 | 4.35 | 50 | |
| Graphics | 3 | 4.80 | 51 | |
| Audio | 30 | 4.26 | 49 | |
| Humor | 4 | 4.57 | 51 | |
| Mood | 60 | 4.29 | 50 |
I wish I took a picture of my final set of words! I love this idea so much! It's such a great twist on these language games. The art is crazy good as well.
All the humour and animation is on point. That starting intro really sets the tone. Art is incredible as usual. A really fun concept.
I believe I can communicate with aliens now
alien.png
The level of polish on this one is crazy and I love how mechanically you dig your own grave if you're not paying attention to what you write. Loved this game!
Amazing submission! I was a little confused at first due to pressing Enter instead of Space
Very good!!! I love it!
fish sword kick littlebird signal
very cool art style and idea! I loved the cutscene at the beginning :D
That obviously means "Capital Eyeball MegaQuestion Rocket Beak"... or perhaps I'm mixing up my lies again...
What a unique experience. I love how in my first playthrough I instantly forgot the words I created seconds ago.
After a meeting with my alien counsel, we have unanimously decided to award you with the **Open to Interpretation** award. As a top linguist yourself, there's no doubt you know exactly what this means.
OpenToInterpretation.png
And of course, my video playthrough, for maximum feedback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6oe4bM07fQ
The presentation is fantastic! Perfectly captures the vibe of saturday morning cartoon. Great little memory game. I like :)
Cool implementation of the idea! Awesome!
Super well done. The idea on the theme is super clever and the art/music/graphics are all really polished.
Absolutely incredible! I thoroughly enjoyed this! I'm trying to critique it but I actually kind find any faults, it delivers on its idea so well! I guess I'd have wanted sound when the guy types?
I had a great time with this game, and I keep thinking about the lore and the ending. The soldier is so well-crafted - his emotions pulled me in the way a good TV show character does
That was both super funny and innovative!
Well done! The art and the storytelling are really good, I love the way the little guy is typing. Took me a while till I figured out what to do but then it was really fun!
This is a cool and funny idea! But my memory can remember a maximum of three characters.
another Sheepolution and the crew banger, fantastic work! solid 5/5
Great memory game! Lasted just long enough to keep me engaged. I liked how all the symbols were different enough but still vague enough to be open to many interpretations.
Here's my final list:
chrome_orNAAFOD8b.png
Nice entry, very original!
I enjoyed this a lot! Was kicking myself for using plural words early and then forgetting which were plural, that was most of my mistakes. Bee helmets! They're definitely talking about bee helmet birthday wine.
Whole experience worked really well. I was pushed a bit and wasn't sure how far I could be pushed. I thought the runtime was just right, but I also know my brain could have held more of this stuff. Interesting.
The opening scene was great, wonderful art and audio too. Nice work!
That was a blast, I do like how friction-less an experience the game is, cohesive and well done and yet it asks of us to whip out some pen and paper to keep track of our lies!
The animations were really great. I do wish that the intro didn't start as soon as you pressed play though but that is a very small detail. I also got a bit confused about how to actually start because I tried to press the start symbol.
The only other thing was me wanting to think about the word choice and having a long message that started with new words made it a bit hard to look up and remember and plan. But it also made sense in the game world that it would be hard.
So very cool indeed.
Play-through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Zx03hnPTw
Loved it! Absolutely hilarious theming, the contrast between the two is absolutely great and all the names of the software is so funny. Beautifully executed. Also.
Walrus archer jester rocket dota!
Lol, the characters and story are easily my favorite part. All the iconography of the symbols is also pretty impressive! Obviously the music and art are top notch! The core mechanic was cool for a bit, but it stretched a bit long for met. Another small twist of some sort maybe would have made more compelling for me to bear with all the memorization. :) Very impressive submission though!
Very fun! I really appreciated the animations of the two characters interacting. The game itself is a cute concept -- thinking of your own mnemonics for an unknown alphabet of symbols. I kind of wish there was a little bit more interaction *with* my words though, e.g., let the army guy form a sentence (somehow? insert dummy words? idk). Alternatively, logging what words other users have assigned to each symbol (and some good automoderation I guess) could be fun, so I could see the army guy say something like "other scientists believed this symbol to be 'blank'". The game is just long enough to not get boring, though some kind of challenge mode (time-based?) might have been fun, too.
What an absolute delight. One of the best games I've seen this jam. Everything from the art to the polish.
Great job, team!
On my run I think I only got the fourth symbol, which meant "above". The game felt very complete, fun and funny.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me of another jam game from some previous event; don't remember the name and the mechanics aren't that much similar, but it had this concept of the player doing the association word-symbol themself and having to keep track of those.
We are too immature to not go straight for boob humor if you allow us with a game like this. A lot of fun to play on stream with that simple Mad Lib level humor layered into the alien translation narrative. Combining the elements of memory and reward/punishment for word choice made for a great experience. Super cool art that reminds me of all the great Humongous Entertainment games! The animation is really amazing for a weekend of work. Nice job, y'all!
[Thanks for submitting your game to stream](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2756861534?t=02h42m52s)
This ended up being one of my favorites. Such a simple idea, and executed in a way that lets the player decide how weird they want to get with it. Well done!
Super original entry, it feels like a silly version of Chants of Sennaar! The pixel art and sound design are hilarious and you can really feel your superior breathing down your neck. It got hard pretty fast though, I think I could maintain track of a dozen of symbols without writing anything. I really appreciate the small details like the guy typing as you press the keys of your own keyboard. A super polished and fun game!
The best and most intense game of memory I ever played! 5/5!
And whoa, the presentation is AMAZING 😲
The whole game is intense, I prayed for my life there!
The amount of detail in the animations, especially the intro and the supervisor, is extraordinary. I love they take everything very serious, yet don't have the money for a proper Ultracam and have to resort to a free trial.
As for the five symbols, I like to name the synbols after animals (easiest way I can recall what they mean), so: elephant bird horse plane manta.
Holy, this is great. Fantastic setting (scary big soldier and funny army themes), little jokes here and there, GREAT and very enganging mechanic, just perfect. Flawless execution and twist on the theme. C o n g r a t s!
operation_alien.png
Very interesting interpretation and fun little game. It was very well polished. Here's my translations :)
Screenshot 2026-04-30 211834.png
fall exit feelings good you I don't know how many symbols exists, but I have a translation for 30 :grin: I have nothing more to say else than: amazing! I like the very polished arts, the humor, and the global mood of this game, I played twice and got the two endings. I just have a minor grief: the system uses hardware keyboard assignations, so one can't use properly other keyboard than qwerty - fortunatly, I remember where the keys change between french and US keyboards, but it adds a little challenge to the game (and btw that's the main reason I saw the "bad" ending… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:)
I seem to be an outlier in that I didn't find this to be a particularly cohesive concept. The polish and wrapping is all outstandingly done as I've come from to expect from this team, but just a flat-out memory exercise struggled to engage me enough to care about said polish. I wish there was something more to latch onto with regards to the symbols, if there was perhaps some sort of general shape pattern which corresponds to different parts of speech, or just some way to even infer what words could mean instead of flat-out making stuff up. My short term memory is quite poor so I resorted to just making notes of all the symbols, at which point it devolves into merely typing in the words from a dictionary and becomes tedium. I think there are interesting ideas here, and it could be something cool if you tied in elements of actual deduction and pattern-matching, but as it stands the presentation feels like it's wrapping something rather hollow. My full playthrough is linked below.
https://youtu.be/SmfmhFL1dDA
I also present you with the **Precision Laser** award. Be careful with your aim!
precision-laser.png
This one was fantastic. The idea, the presentation, everything. Games like this are the reason game jams exist.
My language didn't have all of those characters! But the closest I can get is: FAUCET ??? ALBERT ??? RAY
translation.png
We've been informed by our extraterrestrial sponsors that you are clearly the best game to receive the [̴̧̨͙͈͙̲̟̖̝̖̫̭̟̩͚̜̞̀͛͆̒̐̃͒̇͛͋̚͝]̵̛̜͙̱̦̟̮̬͎̞͉͍͎̯̝̟̔̎͌̈́̀́͋̊͒͘̚̚̚͜-̴̧̡̝̥̎̌̉̓̈́̾̃̓͘̕≠̨̛̛͍̠̝̭̼̯͔̓͌̀̋̓̎͗̆̓͛̕͘͝͝͝ͅ,̴̨̨̛̬͉̳̤͍̠̲̘̭̹̙̈́̇̑̅̂̓̈́͘͘͘ͅ.̶̡̱̝̼̟̰̻͉̖̱͓̞̀̽͂͑̇̽̀͛̒̌̀͐̄̽̊̚|̴̛͖͉̱̲̻̹̝͗̒̽+̸̡̙̜̲̈́̔́́̀͊̎̐̚ award. Congratulations!
Bro, I can't believe you were able to accomplish so much in just 3 days. The idea is so cool, I really felt like I was translating from an alien language.
Fun and funny, with lots of polish! I guess the game itself is simple but all the framing really elevates it, and I think it could work as a longer game if you found ways to extend the idea.
Looks nice, sounds nice, and the cutscenes are impressive. I've been watching the original Stargate recently, so it made me think of that, with the military breathing down the neck of the language nerd.
Gameplay is fun. I kind of just went with the first thing I thought of for all of them and those mnemonics seem to have been good enough because I managed to remember them all the whole way through :p Would be fun to see some increased difficulty in a longer version by introducing barely different symbols etc.
I didn't get all of the symbols in the text you asked us to comment, but I got a screenshot of my final sentence in the game:
operation_alien_translation.PNG
Overall a very pleasant game with a good concept that I think has some more potential mileage worth exploring. Good stuff, thanks for making it! :)
Amazing entry! The art is gorgeous and the animations and snappy and very responsive. I love the character designs/dynamic and the little details like Area 51v2 being too cheap to buy software.
In terms of gameplay, it's a great exercise in memory/nmenomics. I had a lot of fun coming up with my visual interpretations of the symbols. At first I named the symbols based off of when they appeared (first, second, etc.) but then I got the chance very early to corret this once I realized what I had to do, which was fantastic design. The game almost functions like a magic trick... it's astounding that by the end I was able to remember all the symbols meanings and I felt amazing! And the ending is great. I wonder if the big guy was abducted or turned to dust? :O Maybe he's getting therapy for his anger issues on the UFO...
I agree with @mathstr0fficial that this etry is a bit one-note but I think for how long it is, it goes on about as long as it should. A bigger version with additional twists where you actually have to start putting together actual sentances/divining grammer based on new signal information using the nonsense you already wrote, but I think this is good for the scope of the Jam. :)
PS: Excellent music, too!
I'm going to rate this objectively as if it wasn't me. it has a very high level of polish, graphics are lovely as usual. If this was the first game I ever saw from you I'd be like "Great Job Man!", I can even see it winning the jam because it has the traits of a jam winner. And you know I love your games
but my honest review: it just feels a bit.. empty. I renamed the first word at the start because I chose something completely arbitrary that didn't look like the symbol but after the rename I just typed all the words in to completion, my playthrough was like.. 2-3 minutes. it reminded me mechanically of MEMORO and Lost In Translation but it just wasn't as tight as either and doesn't really explore the mechanic. I dunno what it's missing but I feel like there could have been longer gaps with gameplay in between the words so I'd have some reason to forget them or be confused or utilise them in a way that isn't just "type these words as quickly as you can". the gameplay was essentially equivalent to doing an online typing test but without getting a wpm at the end. However, I saw someone else recorded a 15 minute video of this game so I'll take into account that the average person may not just choose clear words and blast through it immediately
objectively speaking it's max score on graphics, it's a good use of the theme, it's got mood, it's amusing, audio was fine, inno I find it derivative of your other games but it's better than 90% of entries and funwise - it's not bad like I won't downrate it but it was just fine
My honest reaction: Screenshot_20260509_013900-1.png
I love this kind of arbitrary pattern recognition because it gets your brain spinning both in the short-term memory gear and the creativity gear. The game was more simplistic than I expected but I loved it. It's a good twist on the theme, and just my kind of game. I wish there was unicode support and some kind of typo guard; in theory, this could work as a crazy speedtyping game, but I had to be extra careful and extra slow because the big guy complained I types "asss" instead of "as" (my S key iss a bit broken).