FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD59 → Signal Lost

Signal Lost

By lanatra

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1013.6123
Fun1013.5223
Innovation1383.4223
Theme274.3023
Graphics1973.2123
Mood1743.3123

Comments

trav 2026-04-20 07:00

I like the idea. I'd add a "how long to the next expansion" timer or something, It took a while on the first game and I nearly left early.

sirplop 2026-04-20 22:31

Pretty fun! Reminds me of Mini Motorways, in a good way.

lectvs 2026-04-20 23:06

Very hard but cool concept!! :smile:

zyertdox 2026-04-20 23:49

A very fun and addictive game. At some point it feels like you’ve already covered the whole area with radars, but even after that you still keep playing.

lanatra 2026-04-21 12:45

@sirplop Mini Motorways (and Mini Metro, which is from the same developers and even better IMO, if you're into these kind of games) was definitely a big inspiration. Thanks for the kind words :)

mr-flower 2026-04-22 02:03

Okay, played once, a little confused, played a second time and unintentionally got hooked. There's something so satisfying about building this network, seeing a gray spot where packets are being lost, putting a tower there, and then new paths are made near those gray spots, where it becomes an infinite loop. It's sooo good and so seemless. So much so, I may have filled out the ENTIRE map with nothing but white.Screenshot 2026-04-21 220113.png

Very good job on an amazing game loop, sad there's no satisfying audio of putting the towers down (unless my audio on the site is bugged). great job and keep up the good work :D

lanatra 2026-04-22 15:51

Haha @mr-flower kudos for playing the game further than I ever did myself, hah! I'm not much of an audio guy, so I admit I neglected sounds (there aren't any effects, it's not a problem on your end). Will do next time :)

Thanks for the feedback!

fassenberg 2026-04-22 20:12

I really liked the telecom idea overall. As I understand it, each cell has a chance to “drop a packet” depending on its color, which is a really cool concept!

The only issue is that the difficulty curve feels a bit odd — once I connected four houses, there wasn’t much challenge left and I just started getting passive income. Also, it really felt like the game was missing sound effects.

lanatra 2026-04-23 08:47

@fassenberg fair points, I actually had a lot of trouble with the difficulty; turns out game balancing is hard :D

Thanks for the feedback :)

floonace 2026-04-23 13:54

It took me two tries to understand the game. The first time, I had to zoom in because the game couldn't go full screen, so I didn't see everything on the screen. The second time, once I understood the game, it started to become really fun. With better graphics and some sound, it would be much more playable. The black and white theme also feels fitting to the game.

doug-graham 2026-04-25 02:06

Very fun, gave me some flashbacks to playing Creeper World back in the flash days.

Great job! I played this for way longer than I should have =)

jhax 2026-04-27 20:48

As a lover of Mini Metro, I really enjoyed this game! There's a cool challenge in trying to get a decent coverage with the masts, but without sort of accidentally creating a shortcut between places that crosses some of the space you haven't got covered yet!

The black and white aesthetic does look cool, but I found it did make the readability of things a bit tricky. Going by the UI scaling it looks like the game's been squashed into the LD window a bit which is maybe making some of the black lines around the houses and packet shapes a bit too thin to make out at times in a way they might not at fullscreen? I don't want to be too negative though, I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing :smile:

grizwhirl 2026-04-28 14:12

Took a second, but got sucked into this one for quite a bit. Well done

denikk 2026-04-29 09:43

The game totally requires some sort of tutorial, because it is a bit hard to understand the final goal and what to do. But the idea is interesting and if you are going to give the game a bit more time and resolve some issues, the game will shine!

zirrrus 2026-04-29 12:25

Fun game! The falloff gradient for the towers might need to be adjusted a bit... I ended up putting a tower right on top of each house to prevent most of the packets being dropped in the light gray but not quite white areas when connecting a new place to the grid.

lanatra 2026-04-30 08:15

Definitely a fair point @zirrrus . This is probably what I'll adapt first if I get back to the game :)