Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Signal Circuits
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 129 | 3.53 | 32 | |
| Fun | 171 | 3.20 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 91 | 3.58 | 31 | |
| Theme | 17 | 4.41 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 228 | 3.03 | 30 | |
| Audio | 214 | 2.62 | 31 | |
| Humor | 209 | 1.66 | 30 | |
| Mood | 269 | 2.46 | 30 |
I love this. I only got 5 levels (not in order), the rest I can't figure out. I selected my second level horizontally and found it quite hard, then I realized it was level 6 after completing it. I checked your itch page and found some other games that look really interesting! Will check those out when I got time. They all look great.
got stuck on xor gate but i liked it!
@absolute-garbage Thanks, the levels are only in a rough order and you can jump around them. Thanks for checking out my itch page too I've got lots of little projects on it that I'm meaning to get back to :P
@msipp27 Ah that one is probably one of my favourites in terms of difficulty, thanks for playing up to that point!
I’m so dumb :D For a solid minute, I was interpreting the game as "Out is where the signal starts, and In is where it enters." But it got easier after that. The in-game hints are actually useful, and it’s a pretty interesting puzzle. I cleared levels 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, but for some reason, level 3 still eludes me, even though I feel like I get the logic. Overall, I had to fire a lot of neurons just to get the signals in-game where they need to go. Give it a try - what describes a "signal" better than the signal itself?
@bambutcher Oh dear, we all have our off days :P still you managed to clear a whole lot of levels. Level 3 is a bit tricky considering how little space you have, perhaps I should have made that grid bigger. Thanks for playing :)
Yep, takes me right back to the 90s, when computers were still made from wood.
The game is difficult, But the perfect level of difficult. You really have to understand what every piece does before you move on, then it's just puzzles from then. Fantastic game, I plan of finishing it.
@pfeyffer Ah the good old 90s when computers were real computers and ran on coal :P
@glitchproduction Thank you for finding the difficulty level right. I did worry at how well explained each piece would be so I tried to introduce as many combinations as I could think of. Good luck on finishing it as the last few puzzles might(?) be possible. Do have a look at the sandbox mode though :)
Pretty cool game, and a fun way to learn about logic gates! It took me a bit to get used to the mechanics. I kept dragging the wire "onto" the component I wanted it to connect to, but this made it overwrite that component. All you have to do is drag the wire next to the component. I found myself trying ctrl+z out of habit a couple times. Overall, nice entry and great work!
You definitely nailed the 90s game vibe! Fun and pleasantly challenging
@pres2300 Thanks I hope it was educational! I think the gameplay area might have been a bit on the small side for some of the puzzles as there is less room to turn wires to connect them. An undo feature would be very cool to have, it would take quite some coding though.
@wormkingboo Thank you I kind of leaned into the aesthetic with bright primary colours to the components. Someday I'd like to make an interface just like the one in early Windows.
Ah, logic gates. Always cool, always fun to play with. :D
I've managed to get through the first 10 levels pretty easily (with the XOR gate taking a moment, but still...), but I can't seem to figure out the Adder. 10+10=100, so I feel like I'm missing the third output here, and just handling the two doesn't seem to be enough.
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It feels like it might be a bit too big of a jump in difficulty. I'll definitely come back to it after a good night's sleep. Even if I don't figure the adder out, there's 3 more puzzles to solve there. :D
Great job on the presentation side! I love clear visuals like that, especially in a game that asks you to figure out complicated stuff. It could definitely use some quiet simple ambient music in the background, but it's not a huge issue - getting focused on the game makes you forget about stuff like that pretty quickly. :)
Wow, I've only played a few levels, but it's a great project that's been presented, congratulations!
@lcstark That's a commendable effort on the adder problem! I think I messed up implementing it as like you say there isn't a third bit to act as a carry flag. Whilst I did manage to complete it myself it was with an incomplete circuit, the tests don't check for overflow to a third bit.
Yeah in retrospect I could have done better by having a 1 bit half adder and then a full adder before the 2 bit one. I was rather flying by the seat of my pants in terms of implementing logic gates I knew about, with more time I would have come up with better ones.
The last few puzzles are, well, erm not very good. Pulser is a simple property of the update rules and then counter I'm not sure if can be implemented in the space available. Same goes for clock, you're better of making it in the sandbox mode.
I'm pretty pleased with the presentation thanks :) I would have loved to have some ambient music but I *still* haven't gotten into music composition, it's on the todo list!
Thanks for spending so much time with my entry, I'm happy to know there are people out there fascinated with logic gates like me :)
@tasakasama Thank you! I'm pleased with how the presentation came out even if it is very programmer art.
Cool concept! Routing signals from A to B and gradually increasing the complexity made for an interesting challenge. It’s especially fun for people who enjoy tinkering with editor-like systems to solve puzzles. The visualized testing was a nice touch, and the clean, polished look worked well. I did wish for a bit more guidance or short explanations in the harder levels to ease players into the mechanics. Hearing the melody once the signal was transmitted correctly was very satisfying.
Too hardcore for me QAQ, I don't want to study ICS again besides school. But I support you drill down to this way!
Oh man I haven't seen these in 10 years. I made it to level 6 easily, but the AND gate is hard. I do however have the vague recollection that every gate can be made using NAND gates, but I don't remember how to make the memory circuits like the SR Latch or flip-flops except for the vague idea of a self-feeding crossed loop. I'll definitely go through the rest of the levels later. This is a great idea! Although perhaps it's only fun for engineers.
@bober Thank you, it's very much like the Zachtronics games where you are given tasks to complete as you see fit with modular building blocks. Yes more guidance on the harder levels would be good idea along with more intermediate puzzles. I'm glad you liked the melody :)
@deng Heh thank you for your support :D
@andriybyelikov Yes! these gates are the other kind of gate you can build everything out of which is very neat. I read a cool textbook called NAND to Tetris which built up a working computer from logic gates, my dream would be to make a game/sim where you can do the same.
hahaha, what a great usage of the theme, it's 100% signal game! I like it! I would only use some color palette, because white text on white blue aren't very pleasure to read
Playing this game is a learning experience, definitely unique and challenging. Wish I had more brain cells to complete the challenges :D
@rafa-fiedo Glad you like it! I'm not sure why I went for white text on the start screen, I guess my thinking was the white highlighted it. I'll definitely look into changing that in the future.
@gubo Thanks, educational games are fun :)
This was very cool! Dug up intro CS course parts of my brain I thought I didn't remember any more :)
It took me a second to get used to the controls/interface but it was pretty intuitive in the end. I think for some of the later puzzles a bit more background information could be helpful, or maybe a way to see what the passing test results are? I forgot what an SR latch was and had to google it, but then googling it threw a circuit diagram up on my screen which spoiled the puzzle!
@benskca having a readout of the test inputs and expected outputs was something I wanted to have but didn't have the time or screen space to add. I definitely want to add it in the future along with truth tables for more complex compound circuits. Nothing wrong with googling things as you still need to convert it into the right gates. Perhaps using a complex name was a mistake there. Thanks!
Nice and easy to pick up game but hard to master. A great game idea with other words. Well done!
Definitely not my genre, but I made it through 5 levels. I get enough programming at work. But I can't help but appreciate the work that went into it — it's actually a really cool thing. I wish I'd had something like this as a kid to learn logical operations. Now I'm "too old for this shit" =)
What a cool take on the theme! Using literal signal processing like this as a game idea is really cool! I must say, I didn't quite manage to build a clock, but I still got a lot of satisfaction when the the XOR gate and the SR latch finally turned green, just a great feeling!
I thought the way the puzzles built on each other and slowly built up your "arsenal" was really well-designed. Plus I loved that it saved the solutions! So when I was trying to build the XOR gate I could check the previous gates again, since my memory is a bit of a sieve. I loved that implementation. Another great thing is how it checks your input in real time, seeing it happen live is so much cooler than just getting a wrong or right message. Adding that in really added a lot. Super fun to play around in this game and see what signals you get out of the different configs! Great game, very well done!
@cogcomp I'm glad it was easy to pick up. There is a lot of potential to the concept that I barely scratched the surface of. You could have all sorts of circuits as puzzles.
@avhatar Thanks for sticking with it. I find it helps a lot to actually see signals pass through gates to understand how they work. The best kind of puzzle games are those that can teach you something :D
@captaindreamcast Thanks! Those levels seem to be the most reasonable difficulty level as the later puzzles weren't really well thought out and I'll probably revamp them.
Ah you noticed that the levels get saved, excellent. I was very pleased to get that working and it lets you go back and see all your accomplishments. The live testing nature was really inspired by the Zachtronics games that do the same where you go through tests in turn with the suspense of whether they'll work or not.
Well this would be great as a tutoring tool, I feel like I'm in engineering school again haha Perhaps a bit of explanations on how each tool works would have helped for some levels, but really nice entry :)
Cool take on the theme. It took me until solving the OR gate to realize that the tests were like actual truth table tests (I know, lol). I only solve til level 9 (didn't try the others) and had fun remembering how gates work.
btw, I used the "system 16 mini" palette from lospec. Really good for getting that old school feel.
@pimeko Thanks I was aiming to make it kind of educational. Some of the tools are a bit more complex so could do with a short intro text box yeah.
@criatura-nocturna Yep it goes through each permutation of the truth table :) If I had had more time I would have shown the truth tables on screen too.
Neat palette I could see myself using that in the future.
Nicely done! After a bit of confusion where I thought level #6 was the second level, I managed to complete the first 12 levels before running out of steam =). I couldn't tell if it was a bug or a feature, but it seems like if two special things are next to each other, they don't (always? ever?) talk, e.g. a splitter into a cross seemed to generate a signal from nothing, and a splitter into a gate didn't visually connect, but seemed like it maybe was sending a signal through anyway. I often had a little trouble drawing the wires I wanted to draw, but after a while I mostly got used to it. A few of the levels I wish I had more description of what the inputs and outputs are - I had to look up what an "SR Latch" was, and, like @lcstark above, I was confused on Adder about which bits were high and low (I *think* `in0` was the actually the low bit, not the high as we both assumed, so his problem was not `10 + 10 = 100`, but actually `01 + 01 = 10`, he's probably got the right solution if he swapped the inputs around). Sounds were minimal but nice. I liked watching my circuits animate. If there was a few metrics to be scored on (time to execute, surface area, number of gates?) this'd make a neat little Zach-like!
This is really cool. I mistakenly played the game in the order of 1-6-11, which resulted in me completing Level 11 without being familiar with the game. The level arrangement was good in the correct order.
Level 13 took me a lot of time (~3h), but in the end, I completed it in an elegant way.
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@jimbly Thank you, with more time I would have made the levels unlock in chunks as you're not the only one who was confused about the order. The splitter and crossing have some weird behaviour if put next to themselves or each other because they broadcast a signal to all neighbours. Gates not showing a connection to a splitter is a bug. The wire tool takes a bit of getting used to yeah, a little gif of how it acts would be nice to have. It would be better if there was a table showing what the expected outputs would be. Adder sounds like it was too confusing, it would have been better if I had swapped the positions of the low and high bits. Thanks for such detailed feedback and I'm glad you liked the animation of the circuits. Lots of stats to optimise would be cool and make it a proper Zack-like :D
@mikan Thanks! Oh dear I can only wonder what you thought of level 11 as the 3rd one... Congratulations on completing level 13, that is quite the achievement :D
@alex-mulkerrin My playthrough: https://youtu.be/Heu0yMouCsc
Very cool, really nailed the 1990s shareware vibe. The interface really encourages the user to experiment with all the different tools available and discover how they work without you having to explain it in a tutorial, so I really liked that. The scaffolding (progressively getting more difficult over time) was nicely done too. I definitely don't have the patience for the later levels but I love seeing other folks' attempts in the comments.
@mikan Awesome :D Really nice to see how you solved the final puzzle with setting up a delayed gate to trim the input signal. First time someone has recorded a video of a game I made, thanks!
@ruthiepee Thank you, I did my best to introduce the elements one at a time and am happy to see people were able to puzzle it out. If I had more time I would have added more intermediate level puzzles as the last ones seem to have challenged lots of people.