mdotedot 2026-04-20 04:36
I almost feel like a scientist. Nice entry.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → The Message
By matt-giuca
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 178 | 3.33 | 30 | |
| Fun | 244 | 2.80 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 30 | 3.94 | 29 | |
| Theme | 16 | 4.42 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 240 | 2.92 | 29 | |
| Audio | 136 | 3.31 | 29 | |
| Humor | 121 | 2.71 | 21 | |
| Mood | 220 | 3.02 | 27 |
I almost feel like a scientist. Nice entry.
The tagging wasnt super clear to me at first but the concept is really cool!
This really tickled my puzzle-loving brain! I've never seen such a game before. I think this kind of thing could very well be developed into a larger "something is out there" game. Although, it may be a bit difficult to some players who are not familiar with things like pulse width, modulation etc.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. Nice!
Interesting game, I got the first one, although I feel there were quite a lot of frequencies that didn't do anything, and the slider movement wasn't particularly smooth (web). For the second one I don't think I fully understood what I needed to do (particularly the high/low pitch), seems like I was looking for a number, just no idea which one (since it was would be really hard to figure out the peak visually).
@ellaris thanks for the feedback. Performance can be an issue on web but I think it's worse when zoomed out (I am drawing a line for every sample which is slow when zoomed out) so it can help to just zoom in a bit. For the second one, you aren't really trying to set a specific number, but draw visually between the peaks (zoomed all the way in). The challenge is identifying which pulses are "high" and "low" frequency, which can be done either by ear, or by simply drawing between two peaks and checking the frequency number (some of the pulses have a higher frequency than others).
@matt-giuca yeah, I wanted to zoom in all the way, but I felt I might not be able to see the whole pattern if I do, maybe it was unnecessary to show the player so much.
Ok, I thought I was looking for the "highest peak" on the "graph", I only listened to the whole "sequence" of peaks and not the individual peaks themselves, I didn't really expect to hear anything for a peak since the whole sequence was a fraction of a second.
Nevertheless, it was a cool experience for someone who doesn't know anything about sound.
i was unable to figure out what to do for the width but it seemed like a fun concept
Lol, the endings! Loved the selection between both of them, I used the level select to go back and pick the "wrong one", great that you added that in!
Very fun game! Worked well for me. Took me a while to figure out the code frequencies, but the helpful interfaces and tooltips pulled me through, worked like a charm. Very-well designed game! Great take on the theme as well, signal decoding as a game is super fun, I loved the different decoding stages and how the signal was converted + decoded during each stage! Had a great time with this game, very well done!
Nice little game! The different steps are great, doesn't need more imo. It's lacking a bit of a mood tho, maybe make this happen on a computer screen, but you have a small room around or something if you could have worked on it an additional day.
Great concept. Something similar went in my head when i saw the theme but i could not figure out how to make it interesting and i did not continue this way. You did it and it's quite interesting and strangely fun. Well done !
Great concept! It felt a lot like exploring the RF spectrum on an SDR, but with a narrative purpose. Going in this direction, I think it would be interesting to explore this concept, maybe with several signals to identify and decode with different methods (not necessarily real ones) ? Great entry!
@nikiprot Thanks for trying! For the pulse width you are supposed to draw between two of the "big" pulses (so for example from the first peak of one to the first peak of the next one). For the code width you are supposed to draw between two peaks of a single pulse (so for example, from the first peak to the second peak) - the challenge is figuring out which pulses are "low frequency" and which are "high frequency".
I launched a dark forest strike to destroy the new world this game really made me FEEL like a trisolaran. Really cool concept, if you don't get my reference I'm talking about the book three body problem, it's about this sort of stuff it's cool.
It's unfortunate that the puzzles kind of solve themselves. But I think this idea could be turned into something great. Perhaps I'll have to try make a game like this it's so cool.
dang, fantastic stuff, this is such a cool and unique idea of trying to decode the signal. Difficult but it was such a fun puzzle to solve. Fantastic job my dude :D
Great entry for the jam. I'm not that much of a fan of this type of games but this one was entertaining. The tuturialization was done perfectly
Very cool game, got stuck at the frequency section for a while but figured it out. Great take on the theme!
I couldnt figure out the tagging part, I guess an example diagram would be very welcome
I guess with a bit more polish this would not require that much explanation. But the idea holds, it is very engaging to decode the signal.
Very cool, this concept reminds me of Contact (and other stories). I like how the puzzles are very close to actual signal decoding, I can't remember that I ever saw that in a game before.
Nice concept! There were a few frequencies out there that gave me a false positive (it sounded like something, but when I found the actual one, it was very different). It also became easier once I realised I didn't have to click successive areas in the list. Also was stumped by the high/low frequency, but your comments above helped. Really cool, and definitely a fan of the tuning in to hear a signal side of it
Interesting concept, nice puzzle, a bit tricky with tagging, but good in general.
@fadingdreamstories
> There were a few frequencies out there that gave me a false positive (it sounded like something, but when I found the actual one, it was very different).
Those are "other radio signals" coming from space. The tutorial text keeps stressing that you find "irregular" signals - those other ones are supposed to be simple repeating sounds such as might be coming from a pulsar or some other non-intelligent life, whereas the actual signal you're supposed to find is a long sequence of irregular high/low frequencies.
Thanks for perservering!
I really like how you turned signal processing techniques into game-format -- really unique,, great work!!
Phenomenal work! The tagging tools were a bit tricky to figure out, but then again usually working with data capture involves LabVIEW, so in some sense this is quite realistic :-)
I think that having a bit of background in using a scope to look at signals helped me understand the terminology and what to try to look for, so maybe someone new to this could benefit from a more visual explanation. Additionally, having the instruction text side-by-side with the tools could be quite helpful, perhaps a notebook + oscilloscope for a diegetic look? It might also be helpful to have some more uniform audio levels between signal and noise since the noise was very loud (at least on my headphones). It could also be interesting to consider a spectrogram of some sort to help identify the initial frequency (so that it isn't necessary to scrub through everything slowly and carefully).
In any case I enjoyed this very much, and the execution is brilliant both on the theme and on innovation. Great stuff!
@auxiliarymoose thanks for the detailed constructive notes! I definitely think the UI and instructions could use some work. I put them together very quickly.
I thought about showing a spectrogram instead of just a time signal (Godot even has built-in spectral analysis so it wouldn't even be that hard), but then I figured that would be even harder to explain to people not familiar with signal processing, so I kept things simple. I would go down that path in a bigger version of this game.
Inspiring work! I had fun as long as it lasted. I hope that somehow the game wouldn't need so explicit in-game instructions. If the player could slowly build their understanding of the game one puzzle at a time and then solve harder puzzles on their own. But it's fine as it is, impressive that you implemented three distinct and neat puzzles in the compo. Well done!
The most fun part of the game is just scrolling through the frequencies (in level one) and seeing what sounds I can find. The sound design there is honestly really cool! Almost feels like a Where's Waldo for audio effects.
The second level took a minute to figure out, mostly because I didn't know you could zoom in with the mouse wheel. I'm not sure if that's mentioned anywhere, but if not, maybe it's something you could mention in the page description? Only other issue here is that I got the order of frequencies wrong the first try, but it might make sense for the order not to matter.
It was pretty cool getting to adjust the "frequency" of the image data in level three, and watching the patterns all shift around. Curious if the audio pattern matches up with the image in-game?