Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → aruseus
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Joe's Alien Assault | jam | 742 | 3.00 | 3.12 | 2.27 | 3.18 | 2.88 | 2.50 | 2.81 | 2.75 |
The game looks cool. I like the atmosphere and how it hints at a larger world beyond the game.
Small detail that could be improved is the camera. It follows the player with little to no smoothing making the movement feel very harsh.
The gameplay was a little simplistic. Changing the amp/freq match was a little too easy, but I didn't mind it. Simple gameplay like this would perhaps fit well within a narrative-focused game (if you wanted to continue working on it).
From a technical standpoint the game seems quite polished. It has a couple levels and other features to make you engage with the clicking/tapping mechanic (bunch of towers with upgrades, armored enemies and stealth enemies etc.)
The gameplay gimmick unfortunately isn't for me though. Clicking on each tower to attack gets chaotic and spammy quickly in a way that's not that fun in my opinion.
Had some technical issues. In the web build, my mouse became invisible. In the native linux build, I had a mouse pointer, but I couldn't click on stuff. The native windows version worked though via proton.
The puzzles were fun, except for the one with the typewriter where you have to type a word (trying to keep it spoiler-free). The hint for that was a bit obscure.
Except for that the puzzles were all very cool and it was always clear what to do. I also liked the overall mood. Great job!
The mechanics were easy enough to intuit and I liked the theme.
I would've liked some kind of goal or ending (at least I don't think there is one. I only played until getting each hero once).
You say it's half-finished, but it was actually really fun. Wish there was more :)
Fyi, it's seize, not sieze :)
It's fun until you randomly lose all your bots to a random landmine. There are lots of mines and I don't think there's a good way to avoid them.
The controls are a little rough. There's not a lot of air control so it's hard/impossible to evade the enemies when they're too close.
I quite like the music and the clean and coherent visuals.
Nice idea to make a rhythm game given the theme.
I'd have liked some indicator to tell me how well I'm doing throughout the song. It'd also be nice to have more variations when the buttons appear, but I can see that being difficult to do in a jam.
Being able to import your own songs is pretty cool!
The gameplay feels a bit uninspired. The level is big and looks very cool. Just having a 3D environment like this at all is impressive for a jam, but in the end you just walk from one spot to the next to press E.
You don't necessarily need to have complex mechanics, but as it is right now, the whole level lacks some substance. It all just feels a bit empty, and needs something else.
Top score for innovation.
I don't know if it's intentional or a bug that the mouse pointer disappears. Makes it hard to play.
Got softlocked at day 5.
Was fun though. Only the controls felt a little unreliable. Made me feel like I was a rather hamfisted operator :D
The music was cool too.
I had fun. Having 20 levels to play is really cool. They're all relatively short and easy to complete, and they add enough variety to keep the mechanics interesting.
Small technical nitpick: using wav for audio bloats the download size.
If only we didn't get this signal theme. The game could be even better when being able to move freely.
I felt a little stupid at the beginning. Took a me a little to realize that I had to click on ships to send a signal, but I figured it out eventually.
The game was harder than I expected as more and more ships spawn, but getting the ships to the harbor felt satisfying as a result.
Thematically it makes sense the way the signals are implemented, but the only thing I didn't like about the gameplay was that it created a big communication bottleneck. You can't really quickly manage multiple ships because sending a signal and turning the lighthouse beam takes too much time. And as a result I often got into situations where I knew I was fucked already but I could really steer them away anymore. Would've been cool if there was a way to speed up the lighthouse maybe make sending signals faster.
Pretty cool entry overall though.
Haha, cool plot twist. Fun game :)
Your github link doesn't seem to work though. Maybe it's a private repository.
I encountered one minor bug. If I scroll all the way up to square wave, the slider gets stuck somehow and I can't scroll down again.
Really fun game though! Simple mechanics with a couple creative levels. I liked that each level challenged me in a different way and kept it fresh that way.
The levels were great at showing me how much I suck at multitasking without being frustrating :D It was fun to keep trying until I got good at the mechanics.
2026-04-24-162714_1306x740_scrot.png
Maybe I just didn't get the mechanics, but I wasn't able to catch the signals reliably.
@clymm thanks :) Funny that you had that experience with the key binding. I was going to use Space, but the way I coded the input, charging a tower with Space would've also skipped the two text popups that appear afterwards if you hold it down for too long, so I worked around that by using a different key. Unfortunate.
I'm only using SDL for input, creating a GL context, and opening an audio device. raylib seems to have a couple other nice things and it seems easy to use, but I kinda like handling everything myself, so I've never tried it. With just C, SDL, and OpenGL it's also easy to just compile it for the web. I think raylib only just got an emscripten backend for the web last month actually.
The first few levels are easy, but then the game gets quite difficult very fast. The timer is a little annoying. I had fun wiring things up initially, but when I got hit with too much interference, I didn't really have time to rethink and rewire the circuit, so I just lost. Maybe a skill issue :D
Exploring all places is interesting because that's where the fog mechanics come into play. The exit is always really easy to reach though. You can in principle speedrun the game without interacting with the fog obstacles at all. I can see why you did it that way, but I'm not sure if that's a good design tradeoff.
Finding the input sequence to finish the map in one go however felt more like work because one fuckup means starting over from scratch and having to input all instructions again. The morse-code-like input fits the theme but doesn't really make it very efficient to do that unfortunately. I'd have wished for a way to change like one instruction without having to start from scratch.
These are small nitpicks though. I hope I'm not sounding too critical.
Cute game though. Overall very smooth. The graphics and the background audio make it feel very cozy.
I liked the simple design.
The UI could be improved a little. The tutorial font overlays the main screen making it a bit hard to read. The font in general is not ideal. It's easy to misread some letters/numbers under time pressure.
Going from signal tuning to entering the data felt a little clunky at times. The field where you enter the data covers the signal slider, and sometimes it took some time to disappear, even though the signal had moved already, so it made you lose some time before you could adjust the slider which felt annoying. Could probably be made more by placing the slider such that it's not covered by the data entry.
Idk if you're thinking about turning this into a bigger game. You could then probably juice up the mechanics a little, by making things light up and shake and make more sounds when you establish a connection and when you successfully decipher something.
I quite liked the simple premise of decoding satellite signals. Would've been fun if there was a twist at the end that the messages you decode turn out to be about something else. (Although maybe there is and I just missed it).