jpat 2026-04-20 05:45
This is my favorite game so far from the comp. I'm getting so many bananas!!!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Speed Signal
By pkenney
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 23 | 4.06 | 38 | |
| Fun | 13 | 4.13 | 38 | |
| Innovation | 186 | 3.18 | 37 | |
| Theme | 244 | 2.91 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 17 | 4.29 | 38 | |
| Audio | 86 | 3.56 | 38 | |
| Humor | 50 | 3.42 | 37 | |
| Mood | 90 | 3.68 | 37 |
This is my favorite game so far from the comp. I'm getting so many bananas!!!
Best game so far! And I think the most frustrating :D I really loved how you handled the, umm, turban cat? Anyway, the enemy that steals you bananas. It's way more fun this way than it would be if it was just a one-shot kill and restart.
I may have to come back to this later on and tackle the rest of the levels!
I really like this robot’s sound design—it feels like it’s made from an old bicycle, a spring, and a bucket of bolts. Kinda funny, though.
The first time I hit the other character I thought I was gonna die and have to restart, but you did something much more interesting and, frankly, better: you just get your banana thrown around. It's great when the author is paying attention and doesn't just automatically reach for a tired mechanic like "lose a life" or "start again". Throw the banana! It's perfect.
I really loved the sound. @nikiroz took the words outta my mouth — that's exactly how it feels! It's really nice. Don't get me wrong, I love sfxr, but the human touch of little self-recorded sounds is really refreshing, and you used them so well.
Only negative I can really say is that the theme feels like a bit of a stretch.
You clearly spent a lot of time on the character dynamics and general game-feel, and it really pays off. It just makes the whole game feel like a thing of quality; the character has real weight to it and is a joy to control. Because you got this so right, the game is just fun to be in, whatever's happening.
I kinda wanted it to be longer, but I'm just being greedy. It's plenty long for a jam game.
This is the first entry I've played whose author declared use of a coding agent. It's allowed, I know, and it won't affect my rating. I won't lie, I feel a certain sadness, like I'm still jogging along in what is now a motorbike race. But it's the future, and we're never going back. It is what it is.
Anyway, really nice entry. Graphics, audio, gamefeel, all here in spades. Nice one!
The tileset is killer! Really well done. How did you like phaser? Impressed you got such a polished feeling game despite switching to new tools! I love the serene lake scene right before the final level. A very nice touch. Sometimes you gotta leet off the gas and just vibe with the little world you created. :thumbsup_tone3:
Great job on level design! One of the common pitfalls I've seen with other games like this is having to wait for the character to auto-move after missing a jump, but you did a pretty solid job designing the level so that doesn't really happen. Always enjoy a solid one-button entry!
why robot need banana? 🤔 I think it's none of my business 🍌 Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 09.45.10.png and this one is way to hard for me 😔 really like this artstyle 💚
A very creative and fun simple game, with clean and efficient visuals. The level design is especially interesting and well done
Really great level design, implemented the mechanic well! Loved the little breather level the most was a nice touch. i think you have a really cool engine to explore this and add new objects modularly over time. really impressive! would love to see it develop to have 40 levels!
This game is so awesome! I can't stop m̶o̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ playing it
Nice graphics and sounds, but over time the levels became too difficult for me.
REALLY GOOD GRAPHICS AND AUDIO, THE GAMEPLAY IS EASY AND SIMPLE BUT REALLY FUN AND HAS SOME PRETTY GOOD IDEAS. THE BEST GAME I PLAYED SO FAR:)
speed-signal.png
- The audio was really pleasant and made the controls feel much more satisifying. - There's a bug I ran into where wall bouncing close to the ceiling gets me stuck in that corner somehow. I managed to break free eventually, though. - The jump distance control felt weird in a way I'm having trouble describing, the best word I can think of is "heavy," like I'm getting sucked downwards the moment I release the key - I probably wouldn't have minded the re-use of level geometry across levels, but did it *have* to be that floating island thing on the right? It was hard enough to beat the first time, but it was doubly frustrating to have to do it over again (and again!).
speedSignalHighScore.PNG
This is great. I was constantly being pleasantly surprised by the little things in the level design that were carefully thought through to give nice places to bounce back around after making a mistake, which helped a lot with the frustration of missing a key jump. The focus on finding things to flip my character around kept triggering some neuron built from WAAAY back playing the old 90s game Lemmings.
As usual for your stuff, things are polished to a T. Sounds are appropriately crunchy and on point, the character controller seemed flawless (though I did notice the enemy got stuck on a corner one time), and all the art looks very nice - the tileset turned out really well too! I especially loved the dithered backgrounds. That was a nice touch to lend some depth to the scenes, and the one level that's just a straightway was a great moment to pause and admire the backdrop.
I'll share a few memorable moments:
1. My first time finding a wall jump. I was staring at that segment wondering how in the heck I was supposed to make the jump, and then it dawned on me _just_ as I reached the wall that I could wall jump, and I nailed the segment the first time. I won't pretend to have landed all subsequent wall jumps, but it felt great to grok at the last minute what was going on and pull off the mechanic.
2. I got in a juggling war with the enemy on one of the levels my first run for about 3 minutes. I kept missing my jump and dropping the banana, then failing to time my attempt to grab the banana until a point when the enemy wasn't there. If this happened a lot it might be a bit frustrating, but as it only happened once it was just hilarious.
3. I kept getting annoyed when trying to shave off time at this point on (I think) the third level, where I really wanted to turn around earlier than the end of the ground area, and repeatedly failed to utilize the walls to do a jump and reverse:
speedSignalJump.png
Then I _finally_ managed to find that there's a very thin margin jump where you can carom off the very bottom of the first wall, as long as you do a very very tiny tap so you don't bounce right back up where you came from. I didn't spend that much time optimizing the other levels, but it was really satisfying to find a (maybe?) optimal path on this level after much experimentation.
speedSignalJump2.png
Great work - thanks for the game!
Great game, very fun, and as others have already noted, it's great that instead of dying you just lose the banana and have to collect it again, good job! :>
Haha, this is fun! It would also be great if the bot had an antenna that, when the jump button is pressed, lit up to show that the signal was received. P.S. The 'impossible situations' are really funny, thanks for the R button.
Very great entry !! I love the janky robot sounds ! Good challenge !!
safgshd.png
Hard but nice and fun game ! i wish the game was a bit less demanding bon the first two levels, but great job ! the game feel is really nice
Very nice game, I like the difficulty and simplicity of it. The sprites are also fantastic with some good audio, nice fun challenge to go through. Especially for a compo, lol, I just completely ignored art style for mine and did a basic black and white pixel design work. Good job on this one :D
Done in 09:57.392 and had a blast! Clever concept and lovely visuals. I think the minimalist approach really allowed you to stress game design and art. Would be perfect with some music ;)
Edit: Just remember two suggestions! Maybe it would be fun to count the number of jumps done per level, so the player could challenge themself to complete with less jumps possible. Also there could be a count for missed jumps, although I don't know exactly how to implement it haha...
cute game, really reminded me of one more jump and geonetry dash. Artstyle is cool isn't tied with the theme much though...
The teacher is truly amazing. In such a short period of time, she was able to design such a complete and fun game. It's truly remarkable! Although it has some difficulty, I think that's precisely what makes it fun.
Hi there ! Cool short game, reminds a lot geometry dash but more relaxed ^^ I like cute simple and colored graphics, smooth nice pixel art animations cool palette and funny sound effects. This fits well together and renders a very cool game feels ; the baboon is quite friendly and funny in the end, even if he got my banana away for few times. Even banana animation feels smooth and contributes to a great mood aha. Very nice polish in term of visual and sfx, feels really good ! I only wished there was a little more levels to exploit mechanics, I could feel the urge to quickly design levels and, because i do it too much myself, blind guessed that the right part of level was a bit copy pasted to design fastly :) as @rogual said "I kinda wanted it to be longer, but I’m just being greedy" XDDD. Great work otherwise, especially for a compo !!! congrats ! Did something about 7 minutes at first try, then tried a speedrun and reached 2m10 :)
Cheers !
@pkenney Love a Phaser game, very polished. Also very frustrating at points :laughing: The banana going flying rather than a full reset was such a nice touch. The connection to the theme is one of the weaker elements, if the signal had changed the robots speed a little at points or via the environment I think it would have tied together v nicely.
I really liked it, I think I've never played a platformer like this before. It was pretty hard, some jumps were quite unforgiving, but I made it through :)
Really nice entry! The right part of the third (I think) level is haaard! :joy:
The gameplay really feels like I control a stupid robot, and the sounds are really fun!
Good job!
Very interesting mechanics!! I love how smooth they feel and the way I can actually bounce off the walls too?
The mechanical sound does get a bit like... "too much" soon, echoing in my brain xD
But I do love the gameplay a lot! Hard though for a person like me who loves just pressing jump nonstop and can't help themselves lol. Definitely makes for a chaotic and long(er) playthrough xD
The way I can hold the key longer to determine the height of the jump feels very intuitive too but I did fu** myself over with that multiple times, "overjumping" the platforms or underjumping :')
I've noticed the pretty backgrounds and new visual platform type by the end as well. I think the visual design is quite pretty! I couldn't quite make out what my character is supposed to be and what exactly they are riding. It seemed to me like a guy in a really cool mobile wheelchair x)
wheelchair.jpg
The game flew by fast and I had a lot of fun. I did switch tabs to write down my thoughts in the proccess so that might affect the time too, I am not sure if the game was getting paused though. But I wasn't really going for max speed, just for fun ^^
The "enemy" is quite forgiving, I was afraid the 1st time the banana would spawn back where it was. Thank you for making it not too hard :D It still has some impact but not too harsh!
Overall, yeah, super fun ^^ I love platformers and this felt fresh and smooth and intuitive to me. Pretty-looking, imo, too. I would only complain about audio, maybe the SE of the wheels(?) can be made a bit softer, or there could be a few diff sounds, or not constant sound, or did I just jump TOO much? xD Great game tho!! Thank you, I've enjoyed it a lot <3
Good job, nice art and sounds. Pretty good inputs. But I didn't understand where is the theme here. But still like it.
02:53 :smiley: Wow, super polished and fun. Great animations and overall feel.
I love games with funky control schemes like this. It's always like I get to relearn how to walk, and it makes every accomplishment pretty satisfying.
The art is nice (the angled dithered gradients in the background are a neat touch), and I especially love the sound effects. Every bonk, jump, door, etc. is just a little different, and I think it does a lot to make the game feel alive.
Possibly world record?
press_space.png
Nice level design !
Thanks so much everyone for the feedback!
@sudocoffee is the world record holder, with @knarf and @justinmullin right behind. I have made a tiny change to help any future speedrunners: 'R' now resets all the way back to Level 1 and zeroes the timer, so that you can abort/restart a full speedrun instantly. I still could not beat coffees time (yet?)!
@rogual (who jogs faster than motorbikes, srsly go check his compo game out and maybe even look at his code) @liam and @tweekus are completely right that the theme is real, *real* weak here. My initial vision included something, but it got cut and I became totally unanchored.
@henk and @justinmullin thanks for reporting the bug. I've shipped a small change that adjusts some geometry to address it. This game groups the tiles into larger meshes in an effort to remove seams that were problematic. But the areas your bugs were in, I had structured them so that seams still appeared and caused some issues. So for example here is the adjustment I made to the corner where the player can spaz out against the geometry, it's just a cosmetic change but it alters the way the mesh groups and fixes the issue:
bugfix-corner.png
The enemy guy has invisible cage-walls that constrain him, so I had to do something similar for him:
bugfix-cage.png
And I found a way to softlock the game in another spot, where the baboon can knock the banana out of an area, and the player cannot climb back up to get it. So I added this one small platform here so that you can:
bugfix-softlock.png
It's interesting that all these flaws arose from geometry. I'm not used to doing "level design" per se, so I appreciated that folks mostly enjoyed the level layout.
Except for that one crazy climbing wall a few of you complained about. I know just the one you mean, and I buried my face in my hands watching a streamer fail it over and over. That wall is too hard, my bad. But I've not adjusted that.
@khaotom I've been enjoying Phaser, and I *really* liked LDtk. But it probably wouldn't have been possible to ramp up so fast on multiple new tools w/out some of the AI assistants. I also find the Phaser arcade physics easy to use but the limitation to have only axis-aligned rect or circle colliders was pretty inconvenient at times.
And thanks to @kanity who drew this cool art about the game and posted it:
fan-art.jpg
Awesome submission! The pixel art is incredible and the level design is genuinely excellent. You can immediately tell how much work and attention to detail went into it!
Simple but great game. I feel like the difficulty was just right for me, even if the last level did feel a bit "getting over it". But since it was the last one that was just a good thing. The game feel was perfect, the sound of the jumps were great. Good job!
Congrats on the great placement!