FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD59 → Semaphore Euphoria

Semaphore Euphoria

By papaver

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3633.6429
Fun714.0029
Innovation2393.6829
Theme404.4629
Graphics6043.3129
Audio3723.4029
Humor1823.5129
Mood5843.3529

Comments

tay-elenberg 2026-04-21 21:08

unfortunately not for my keyboard my arrows are small and not comfortable this is a good game for a jam, fits the theme and I like this frog!

papaver 2026-04-22 01:20

@tay-elenberg Thanks for playing and your comment! It is indeed quite annoying if your arrow keys are very small. I had already programmed alternative options for the arrow keys: the numpad and the letters I,J,K,L, but I hadn't yet added it to the description above. You could try if it works better with the alternatives. :smile: Also, with numbers 1 to 5 you can skip levels :wink:

djtequila 2026-04-22 22:30

Straightforward concept but it's surprisingly difficult, especially the final level (took me multiple attempts but I got it!) Cute characters as well. Nice job overall!

illiteratelexicon 2026-04-22 22:54

@papaver Pretty fun! its quite simple but still tricky to get the hang of!

papaver 2026-04-22 23:06

@djtequila Thanks for playing and your comment! Cool to hear that you managed to finish the last level! :smile: :clap: After a weekend of playing it myself, it is hard to judge how hard it is :laughing:

2026-04-23 12:51

I completed the whole game. I enjoyed core mechanic very much, but the whole game is very rough around the edges. Usually I gloss over it, but in this case it made the gameplay noticibly worse. Examples: text overlaying our character in 3rd level, wierd layout of characters and UI, grey background, unnecessary end of level conditions (press on the boat, pres 4 times) while showing panel suggesting that you lost (it made me feel dissapointed every time before I realised that I actually passed the level), in timed levels it is unncessary to lose after mistake, it would be enough to just make someone repeat just this letter or maybe two last letters (it's timed after all, if mistake costs you time it's enough of a penalty). So yeah, you got a great core, but everything around it made it worse.

oddballdave 2026-04-23 13:21

I'm not sure what I was expecting going into this, but that was tons of fun. I liked that if you made a mistake you could still complete the level if the message was legible enough (Of course excluding the last level). The graphics were readable which is important for a game like this. Great entry. Good stuff :8ball:

2026-04-23 16:23

Nice music, characters. It gave me a lot of pleasure! Thanks!

catanus 2026-04-23 16:41

An interesting and original concept. The final level was quite a challenge :)

william-capon 2026-04-23 21:40

So cute! Really creative idea and clean implementation. That last level was diabolical

papaver 2026-04-23 21:44

@william-capon @catanus Thanks for playing my game and your comments! I hope that the craziness of the last level at least made you smile :smile: Did you manage to finish it? I notice that I turn my head a little during that level :upside_down:

papaver 2026-04-23 21:45

@mersaries Thank you so much! :heart:

papaver 2026-04-23 21:47

@oddballdave Thank you! :heart: Yes, that was indeed the idea; that you have to figure out what the message said, either puzzling a little with the letters you find or by replaying the level. :smile:

2026-04-24 12:18

Cool idea, simple game but fun to play. Great job!

cosmogonicfrog 2026-04-24 12:33

This is so great! Simple concept but actually quite difficult, particularly in the final level. The music is great and I love the vector graphics art style. Feels like an old-school flash game which is awesome.

Just to let you know, I'm running this in Zen browser (basically FireFox) on Linux and it ran fine. However, the game opened up in a new window and the scaling was a little bit wonky. I can see you're using Godot so in the future, you might want to experiment with the "display/window/stretch/mode" project setting to solve this.

Screenshot from 2026-04-24 13-21-21.png

Otherwise, great entry :)

universeflow 2026-04-24 16:44

fun little game, the in-game tutorial was great, I also love how it was set at a school to make you feel like you're learning before you get into the actual game :D something I disliked was that if I made a mistake I'd still have to finish the level before I could try again, that was a bit frustrating as I sometimes accidentally did something wrong and then it already registered the wrong letter. I would have preferred if it just didn't register and then I had to try again.

papaver 2026-04-24 20:42

@universeflow Thanks for playing and for your comments! In the school setting, you were not able to mistakes, but it's different out there in the world! :wink: By the way, you can hit R to retry a level, at any point in a level. But that was maybe not so clear... I get that it feels frustrating if you missed that! In level 3 and 4 I thought it would be funny that you (might) have to figure out what you had to do, even though some letters might be wrong.

papaver 2026-04-24 20:46

@cosmogonicfrog: Thanks for playing and for your nice comments!

And thank you very much for bringing this ugliness to my attention! On purpose I deselected 'full screen mode' in itch.io, to avoid people seeing this, but apparently that was not enough. I downloaded Firefox and played my game there, and I saw it too... I played with the mentioned setting, and now it is sort of fixed! (Only now it scales with your window size, which might be ugly in a different way :wink:)

Thanks again! :heart:

universeflow 2026-04-24 21:32

@papaver thanks for the hint, R to reset does make it way better, I must’ve missed that!

frowsyfrog 2026-04-24 22:49

Captura de pantalla 2026-04-24 174742.png

The game is very fun! I tried to beat all the levels, although the last one was very difficult for me. Still, it’s a very good game!

papaver 2026-04-24 22:54

@frowsyfrog Thank you so much for playing my game on your stream! It is always fun to see people trying my game for the first time. :heart: And that is a very good screenshot, hahaha :laughing:

bling 2026-04-25 08:20

It's a fun game. Small but interesting! It reminds me of some kind of reaction game in Mario Party.

frozenfire92 2026-04-25 18:37

This was a really good entry! The music was great. It definitely was a little hard to work the brain with both hands and directions, especially when the frog was on the plane! Keep on making games

Screenshot_2026-04-25_15-33-01.png

papaver 2026-04-25 18:47

@frozenfire92 Thanks for playing and your nice comment! And congrats on finishing the last level! :clap: :heart:

arkwright 2026-04-25 20:26

Simple yet fun game with cute characters and nice artstyle!

verbante 2026-04-25 20:29

Great game! Some error forgiveness would be cool tho I'm quick to jump to stuff and my keyboard apperantly does not support all input combination. Despite not being able to complete I had a lot of fun!

verbante 2026-04-25 20:29

also

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIMEPPZxzyg

thunderklaus 2026-04-26 09:09

Very nice game. Hits the theme perfectly. I liked the tutorial being in an office. Nice atmosphere overall. Yet, quite unforgiving...

itero-proto 2026-04-26 09:32

I give it almost the maximum rating! GOOD JOB! I LIKE AND UNDERSTAND SUCH GAMES. THERE ARE NOT MANY WORDS AND LETTERS. IT WAS CREATED FOR ME πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

laminariy 2026-04-26 19:53

Really nice little game, but I always messed up the same few letters because it's hard to differentiate between full down and down-diagonal flags!

I definitely can see this project becoming a small educational game for children! Really liked the music!

blubberquark 2026-04-26 20:43

Never before has a game needed controller support so badly. Well, then you'd also have to make it more difficult...

papaver 2026-04-26 21:10

@verbante When I thought of this idea, I was afraid that the number of keys pressed (or some combination of keys) would be limited, because I had a vague memory that this used to be the case. But when I tried it on my laptop, I was surprised to notice that it did work! (But not with all combinations). I am sorry that it didn't work for you! Did you try the alternatives for the arrow keys?

And hahaha, thanks for the video! :laughing:

papaver 2026-04-26 21:11

@itero-proto Thanks for playing and for your enthousiastic comment! :heart: I agree, I also don't like too much text in a game! :smile:

papaver 2026-04-26 21:16

@laminariy Thanks for playing and for your comment! I understand that those directions were a bit a hard to distinguish. I think that by looking at the colors of (the bars of) the flag, you can see the orientation, but it's harder when the frog is moving around :sweat_smile:

papaver 2026-04-26 21:18

@blubberquark Ha, I didn't think of this! Maybe I can add it later to see how that works. Maybe then I could ramp up the speed even more! :smile:

verbante 2026-04-26 21:34

@papaver it doesn't work on my external keyboard but it works in my laptop keyboard. in any case the bottleneck is not my keyboard but my impulsiveness lol. I'd really like to come an try again if you add 3 lives or something like that

(despite this the game did a realy really good impression on me so it gets incredibly high ratings for pretty much all categories from me)

verbante 2026-04-26 21:40

i also like the environments in this game so much

wendel-scardua 2026-04-26 22:21

Captura de tela 2026-04-26 191709.png

you're welcome :)

I like how the other levels have some kind of error tolerance just by the fact that, as long as we understand the message, it's fine (not just because I kept missing some letters πŸ˜…)

2026-05-04 08:12

Great job on the game! The concept is really creative and fun to play! I was a bit surprised to see a fox, as I always thought semaphore was strictly for aircraft carriers and ships games πŸ˜…, but the idea actually works great. Really cool take on the theme!

papaver 2026-05-04 09:54

@nuclme Thanks for playing and your kind comment! I must admit I opted for some (random) animals, because they are cuter and easier to draw than humans :laughing: The semaphore flags were also used to signal between chains of relay towers in France as as sort of 'optical telepgraph'.

emsea 2026-05-06 07:47

Dropping a long over due comment here. Really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to play this game [on stream.](https://www.youtube.com/live/fCwnxSEAlQY?si=lEWUYxUeIHQhgk4N&t=8458)

My thoughts are shared in the VOD, but I will say this was one of my favorite games of the Jam. Hope we see you back for LD60. ✌

papaver 2026-05-06 21:12

@emsea Thanks again for playing my game on your stream! And thanks for sharing the video. :heart:

bobanko 2026-05-07 20:51

nice cozy game, music is a bit annoying, but gameplay is solid. i like the second layer of gameplay with decoding messages and do the action.

BTW, we had similar idea, about aircarrier, but decided to move on with lighthouse.

Screenshot 2026-05-07 at 23.48.18.png

sarah 2026-05-08 15:16

I love the music! It sounds super peppy and the idea itself is fun. It reminds me of the shy guy mario party mini game, but I like that there are two flags. It's a bit difficult to coordinate two hands doing two directions, but it's challenging in a fun way! Great work!

papaver 2026-05-08 17:37

@sarah Thank you for playing and your kind comment! :heart: