Signal Back! by sinemual 2026-04-21T00:57:11Z
I liked conectivity/optimization part of it, until i ralized 'spamming' the $600 pieces is the easy way to success. Overall a really charming game.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → criatura_nocturna
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | swpr | compo | 149 | 3.46 | 3.50 | 3.48 | 3.11 | 3.40 | 3.14 |
I liked conectivity/optimization part of it, until i ralized 'spamming' the $600 pieces is the easy way to success. Overall a really charming game.
Deliciously infuriating kafkian nightmare. At some point I stopped being "bothered" and just kept giggling and reading with morbid curiosity. So yeah, the writing is great, but so is the way it was all put together. A fantastic entry!
Cool take on the theme. It took me until solving the OR gate to realize that the tests were like actual truth table tests (I know, lol). I only solve til level 9 (didn't try the others) and had fun remembering how gates work.
btw, I used the "system 16 mini" palette from lospec. Really good for getting that old school feel.
As a non chess-player, I'm now all for regicide (just kidding, I always was). Jokes aside, it was actually a fun challenge.
Timers are always a bit tricky in "turn-based" games, they can be quite aggravating, but also, when you get into the rhythm, exhilarating. I experienced both cases in the course of playing the game.
I think the game could have benefited from a visual indicator of the time remaining. It makes the tension more legible and provides the small win of surviving a close call. As things stands, you only get the bad feeling of being slightly late.
Great style. For me the controls are on the "a bit too slippery" side of things. In spite of that, I liked the "indirectness" of the smoke mechanic, and actually enjoyed its trickiness (I mean, it's smoke, of course it's going to be tricky to control).
the radio thing goes a long way in giving the true and tried of “sink the ship” a new feel.
the whole time I kept picturing this scenario of me as a retired spy, chilling in some beach, going back to do one final job, using the only tool at hand, an old, barely functional radio.
good job!
The mini-games are the right amount of easy, obvious and not so obvious this kind of collection should have. Would have loved to see more of them.
As an experienced card I found it fun and easy to understand, even if the tutorial gave me the initial impression that it was going to be the other way around (unnecessarily complex). I also quite liked the visual style. Good job!
Imma be real honest and say that as a full blown card game for me to "try hard" in, I think the design space might be a bit too narrow. Those games are often played in the tens or hundreds of matches a month, with masses of people playing over and over. Not saying it couldn't be made to work, but it would need serious design work to ensure the robustness such a game requires.
Having said that, there's a whole family of small dueling card games that are easy to carry around and meant to be played whenever a chance arises. I'm thinking of games like Riftforce, "Air, Land, & Sea", Cardia... which more or less resembles the scale of printing your current "set" and playing it "kitchen table" style. So I could see a version of your game developed towards that space.
Very stylish and the way its twist introduces hidden info and a bit of logical deduction is also really cool. Would love to see more of it.
I played a lot of nonogram as a kid, so I absolutely loved the twist on it!
And the last level is so cute <3
Very cute, I loved the overall presentation.
Such a simple game, but all parts come together nicely. Even like the little wait between the window going red and the door actually opening works well. Every time I was like "oh shit, did I pushed it too far? Am I getting caught?" Fantastic!
@pimeko The numbers change color to signal when a clue is affected by more than one mine. So a "blue one" means there's one mine one step away, a "green one" means two mines are one step away, and so on. Although that usually only shows up in boards with several mines.
Also if you select a 'flagged mine' it gets de-activated and discounted from the tally (that's different from minesweeper, now i see how that could be a source of confusion). So you don't need to manually clean the whole board to get a win. It actually does itself when the tally reaches zero and there's even a slight change in the smiley face. At any rate, imho if you figure out where the mines are, that's a win.
@asieke I also definitely prefer right-click for flagging, but it was only half-working in my browser (working but also triggering the right-click menu) and couldn't troubleshoot it on time.
That's valuable feedback. I'll add a small flashing effect or animation to signal where to click to apply difficulty changes and that yes! going for a lower move count makes it funnier.
@z1116730 It's definitely missing, I only noticed it until it was too late.
@wouter52 I'm for sure adding right-click and some in-game tooltip for the colors in a future update. And yeah, maybe the taskbar is a good place to put some extra info/controls.
@regmont
mfw.png
ofc I knew about it, still you love to see it...
@dennis Minesweeping (demining) is usually done using electromagnetic or acoustic radars. The way radars work is you send a SIGNAL and, according to how it bounces back, infer information such as distance, direction, velocity... When done for humanitarian reasons (in former war zones), the process of demining has to be exhaustive to actually make those places safe. So huge extensions of land are segmented in lanes or quadrants so that they can be methodically inspected and all mines deactivated.
That's exactly what you do in the game. You "probe" a quadrant and get the distance to the closes mine, flag it and then deactivate it.
@graymansion The game indeed collapses and devolves into pure guessing past a certain mine density threshold, but I think it happens in exactly the same way that it does in minesweeper. A different density for sure, but the same phenomenon in kind or am I missing something?
The game is missing 'first-click safety' and a few other QOLs (color clues not shown in-game..), so there's also that. The lack of fcs is quite unfortunate because, so long as your opening cell isn't of distance one, even high difficulty boards (30+) are solvable with no guesswork. I haven't suss out every possible starting combination, so maybe it isn't all of them, but most are playable.
Here's one difficulty 35 board I just solved with no guessing involved.
dif35.png
The most important difference with minesweeper is you can squeeze information by deactivating known mines.
@graymansion Oh, I see. I thought you had a different kind of thing in mind. It's alright. Cheers 🙂
@henk Thanks a lot. I'm doing some work in the post-jam version and your snippet really came in handy. It helped me realize, half the reason it wasn't working was because I forgot to turn off my "absolute right-click" extension 🙈
@fabonacci The game works at its best when you're trying to solve it with as little info as possible (not deactivating mines as you encounter them would be part of that). This is only vaguely suggested by the 'move count' number and, in practice, there's no numerical difference for doing either (I'm addressing that in the post-compo version).
Either way, I'll have to think it through, but there's probably no reason to not also have an option for instant deactivation.
Such a beautiful game(sound, art). At first the control scheme felt like a mismatch, and, perhaps, even a bit too demanding for a game with such a warm style and narrative focus. In any case, after failing a couple times, I got the hang of it. Overall, a great entry I very much enjoyed.
Absolutely loved the style and writing. My only (minor) nitpick is the button "centering" whenever it goes from two options to one and vice-versa (so every time I had to relocate the mouse slightly). It sounds trivial, but it kind of disconnects you from the narrative tempo, even if just for a fraction of a second. As I already said, this is a great entry, excellent job!
I quite liked the moodiness of the second image(the one with the lamps). I guess it goes against you stated concept, but among the greens and "sparseness" I get a cool vibe of driving-at-midnight-in-a-mysterious-nuclear-desert-wasteland- kind of thing.