Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → nathmate
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Finnicky Fourier Toy | compo | 127 | 3.54 | 3.15 | 3.71 | 4.37 | 3.13 | 2.26 | 2.79 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Dysbarism | compo | 261 | 2.97 | 2.87 | 3.52 | 3.85 | 2.87 | 2.20 | 2.67 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 6 Kadabra Resurgam Ocus | compo | 330 | 2.74 | 2.53 | 4.05 | 3.58 | 2.62 | 2.26 | 2.28 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Fac Spatium | compo | 297 | 3.11 | 2.86 | 3.58 | 3.40 | 2.81 | 2.42 | 2.63 |
Linux build worked fine for me on Manjaro.
Very striking game. Was the fifth button in the laser room added last minute because you realised it wasn't solvable with the four in front, by any chance :stuck_out_tongue: ? I agree with others that the voice lines get a bit repetitive if you have to restart a level multiple times. Still an impressive entry, I'll certainly be checking out your shader code.
Solid game. I found the sheep tended to get a bit stuck in the trees in the back right corner. Also I found the later waves with more sheep quite a bit more interesting than the early ones, do I try to keep them all together and put them in the pen in one go? is it worth to chase after one sheep that left the flock?
It would be interesting to see what the game would be like if the sheep had some simple flocking AI, like a Boids algorithm. One more small thing I found myself wanting was a sprint key.
Very cool game. As others have mentioned, something like a chat history would be very nice in a future version. Similarly some hint of the future trajectory when mousing over different instructions so avoiding collisions is a bit less guess work. Arrivals coming in retrograde also seems to make some collisions very hard to avoid.
Nicely executed concept. The tire trails were visually pleasing. Being able to drift with the handbreak would be cool.
Very nice. I grinned when I first got a red-asteroid chain reaction. The difficulty scaling was just right to keep my engagement, though I think you could start introducing the new asteroid colours in one per level from level 2.
2023-10-04-135225_1318x756_scrot.png Cool game. Like any design that has RNG integral to it, it would be nice to have some way to control what you get given. Just being able to reorder what is being unloaded from the ships would make it feel less frustrating.
The balance between simplicity and depth is really good here.
This game is really underrated. The balance is a bit snowbally, early RNG to get your economy rolling seems important. Conversely stacking the ranger upgrades has them machine-gunning down enemies before they can get on screen. But that's to be expected in a compo game. The core loop is really solid. 2023-10-08-193731_1920x1080_scrot.png
Gee Billy, how come your Mom lets you submit a game to *two* gamejams.
Very charming art and music, and I thought the difficulty level was just right. Only critique is that the enemy cycle patterns seem to matter a lot, sometimes you respawn and an enemy is in a part of their cycle that makes the next segment particularly difficult.
I couldn't figure out how to change the monkey's element, which seems possible from the screenshots. The concept is interesting, but I found it basically impossible to visualise how the tiles would move each turn. So I just tried to remove all the fire, since that tended to be what killed me in the late game.
Brutal
Cool game, the procedural map plus the topographical representation is really impressive. Only critique is that as soon as you get the first cargo size upgrade you start getting offered jobs you can't take (or maybe it just worked out that way for me). Also it would be nice to be able to rotate the cargo.
Reminds me a little bit of the boardgame Go. I think the map being smaller would lead to the pace feeling a bit faster and more tactical instead of just racing around grabbing the food before the opponent can.
Cool concept for a game. I found myself wanting a bit more information out of the UI, such as what tiles would make which resources go up\down and by how much. Similarly if I was going to replace or combine a tile an indication as to how it would change the resources before I did it would be helpful.
I like the art in this, the monsters trailing after you are quite menacing and a clever way to prevent back tracking. The foreground trees blocked loot quite often, which was a bit frustrating.
An incredible amount of content to put together for a jam game. Looks like it was a ton of fun to make as well. I appreciate the easy mode, as the base difficulty is quite high. The inventory management was quite clunky, though it reminded me of some 2000s freeware RPG I played but can't remember the name of.
Fun to play through, though a bit easy. I never found myself needing to do anything but grab the closest mission and complete it. Having some sort of ship upkeep, especially on upgraded ships, might introduce some risk-reward mechanics that would make it more compelling. I wished the mission list could be sorted by proximity to the source planet as well, to make it easier to pick a next one. I liked how the "shape" of space seemed to change as I got range upgrades, making different routes viable.
Very interesting game. It would be nice to see what causes what scores, it feels like I'm making sentences at random. Also the overworld map generation seems quite unbalanced.
I really like the idea but found it hard to get into. I died about 3 times before realising I had to manually harvest food. I also did not realise you could rotate the planet during the meteor defence for awhile (I tend to just jump into games and only read the descriptions if I can't figure them out). A low-hanging fruit improvements I can think of is to put symbols over the buildings so they're easier to identify at a glance, especially from the zoomed out view. The flag for the empty spaces do this and are good.
Nicely done, a Kepler Syndrome game is something I've had kicking around in my head for awhile. I wished I could refuel my rockets somehow. Incredible that you made the music on a PSX tool!
Really enjoyed this. Having to navigate microgravity without "strafing" thrusters is certainly a challenge. A tiny tweak I would have done is add a life support timer or something to encourage the player to try to get to the pod as fast as possible.
Neat idea. The atmosphere was eerie. I got stuck and couldn't finish though, maybe adding a slight glow to interactables if the player hasn't progressed after a few minutes would be a good hint system.
Cool game. The staccato clones teleporting as they follow you was a really nice visual effect. The intro sequence and music were wonderful too. Can't really think of anything you could do better in this version. 2023-10-03-173411_1920x1080_scrot.png
2023-10-03-222244_1024x600_scrot.png The game is quite difficult with the number of enemies being spawned and the number of projectiles they throw quickly becoming overwhelming. I definitely felt like my space was limited!
Since you always want to be firing anyway, it would be nice if it just happened automatically.
I liked the art, though I couldn't tell what the glitchy areas were meant to be (aside from very damaging).
Nice concept and well executed.
The ship design, comm chatter background sounds and general vibe felt like Homeworld homages. Also got some Battlestar Galactica vibes, and of course there was Mr Khan. Were the XO and comms officer portraits of members of the team, by any chance?
**Bugs**
I did manage to sequence break the tutorial by building things other than two hab block immediately. And it seems the game state is not properly reset on restart, I immediately get "-1 days to dehydration" and "-2 available housing" if I lose from dehydration with 5 housing spots, for instance. The tutorial doesn't actually seem to be skipped if you pick "skip tutorial", you still get the prompt to build habs after building vertical farms. I also got the "rescue governor" event twice in a row (the first time I declined).
**Balance**
I agree with @zerohalogen that it's a bit too easy, past the initial stabilisation of resources. If you want to pursue the game further having resources dependencies (food requires water, etc.) would be cool, and of course more events and event chains as FTL and Papers Please have would lead to a nicely fleshed out game.
Nice little concept. The firing sound gets a bit loud once you get several firing speed upgrades. The popup enemies were amusing but also quite scary.
Nice simple concept with a fair bit of complexity emerging out. The RNG is a bit domineering, having some tools to deal with it would make it feel less brutal. In particular considering how important power lines are they feel like they should be more common. It would also be nice if you can overlay tiles of the same type on top of each other, instead of only empty spaces.
Loved the wheeeoooooow wheeeoooooow.
I liked the concept, though it seemed only abstractly related to the theme. Having an indicator of how much each number is increasing\decreasing per second would be helpful.
2023-10-04-200527_433x362_scrot.png Nice game. I really appreciate the "choose your own difficulty" with the different loadouts possible.
Nice game. Not sure if it's intended, but punching the corners will push both adjacent sides back.
Very brave of you to make an orbital mechanics game for a gamejam! I agree with the others that the touchiness of the controls plus the "keep the entire orbit on screen" restriction make it quite difficult, but I played to the end and enjoyed it immensely.
Cool game, I love me some travelling salesman problem. The intro and outro splashes were very pretty, and the in game art and sound relaxing. Fuel and cargo taking the same space and the cap on money paired with the upkeep cost makes for a nice little challenge. I can't think of anything I'd add or take away, a really tightly designed game. Well done.
Fun game, as a mechanics-focused guy myself I like seeing other games with interesting mechanics at their core. I'm curious why you went for metaballs instead of a per pixel or polygon intersection based solution? It's certainly novel, but I noticed that shots tend to affect terrain fairly far away from where the shot lands quite often.
For the movement I'm a fans of left\right (and\or A\D) being counterclockwise and clockwise, in games like this.
Can easily see it expanded into a full game with enemy AI and different weapon types.
Really fun to play. Could easily be expanded with more levels with different terrain layouts, as well as different cubes with slightly different following behaviour. Having pickups to give points, more lives, maybe even a Pacman style "power pellet" where you could destroy the cubes for a short time.
The only thing I'd change about the current version is add an indication of how much invulnerable time is remaining after the player takes a hit.
@gato The UI starts emptier and fills as you do the "tutorial". The game certainly is a bit janky and temperamental. @themixedmaster That definitely looks broken.
What browser are you using? If you could post a screenshot of the browser console that would also be helpful.
@zungryware If you click the target symbol below the railgun you can then target another planet and it will shoot resources there.
@themixedmaster > 2160p
Ah yes that's probably it, I only tested at 1080p and the mouse's relative position in the screen is used in calculations quite a bit.
Nice atmosphere, the lighting in particular was really good.
Not a big deal but the 'dialogue' font was kind of hard to read, and I found the sequencing in the second level a bit confusing. Not much else to critique, it's a solid little platformer.
Very nice art and general feel. I would put a circular drop shadow or the like on the characters to make it clear where the hit boxes are, maybe a small indicator as well so you know which direction you'll be pushing in.
I liked the addition of having to stay still for the bonus pentagrams, shakes up the usual "run forever" gameplay of VS-likes.
The core kill enemies, get upgrades to kill more enemies loop is a solid classic. I mostly just wanted to be able to move faster through the rock and see further. The invisible walls, slow move speed, having to run back to base for energy, and the screen flashes when taking damage were all quite annoying.
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Fun take on the travelling salesman. Very tight design, it feels like there's nothing you could add or take away from it. Only critique I can think of is to call a bit more attention to customers who's demand bar is about to fill up, as they all blur together a bit when there's a lot of them.
Nice concept, the combination of route planning and platforming is fun. I found the controls a bit 'sticky', had to completely stop to summon or jump, which was frustrating.
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On the leaderboard first try :sunglasses:
It would be nice if there was some indicator of where the next boost portal was if you were on the wrong side of the tube-track-thing. Feels like the game's about chaining them, as they seem to spawn not too far away from each other around the tube, but if you lose the trail it can be tricky to get back on it.
Your executable links are giving 404, and I don't see a LD55 file in the repository. So unable to play.
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Fun game. Cute art. Music was a bop. I mostly just spammed summoning on whatever the largest clump of enemies were, so it didn't feel very strategic. Still fun to play.
The enemies were extremely menacing. Agree that the shooting golem seems straight up better than the others.
Beautiful sprite work. I did get stuck in between pixels and vibrate back and forth sometimes, was a bit unpleasant. I didn't like summoning health\mana as a mechanic, just felt like busywork.
Interesting game, feels like a cross between foosball and pong. The mana income felt a little too low, most rounds you can only get a single unit out. I can see how the different units counter each other, but there's usually only one or two on the field at any point, it would have been nice to have more interacting at once.
Itch link is giving 404.
Guessing the right element counter and still having a chance to lose the fight felt bad. Cute concept overall.
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Cool game. The teleporting pair seem a bit OP. Ended up running it on the faster speed and just pausing every time a new input-output pair spawned. It got quite hard to track where the new portals were appearing once it zooms out a bit, and the indicators of how quickly the inputs were triggering and how often the outputs needed items were too small to see.
2024-04-15-130913_800x454_scrot.png I didn't realise the crystals are what charged the electrons at first, only noticed when I looked at your gif. It gets quite difficult by the end, enemies spawning directly in front of you combined with not being able to easily aim your attacks is a nasty combo. I did find myself running into a freshly-spawned enemy I couldn't see every time I went behind the tower. Cute art and sound design, love the colour palette. It's maybe a touch dark but that does help the light effects pop off more.
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Nice juice. Love to see a tutorial in a jam game. I think if a Shooter Tower hits a bunch of units on the same pixel they do splash? I spammed a bunch of marksmen and they seemed to die instantly, idk. Not sure how the right button control was meant to work, maybe should have been in the tutorial. Fun game.
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Do you need to complete 10 5-star missions to get the victory screen? I'm not sure where I was up to, but a demon jumped out of a completed job directly into a new one ruining my streak. It was funny every other time that happened, but quite annoying in the endgame trying to get the 5 stars. Similarly not being able to tell if a job was a 1-demon or 2-demon one without putting a demon in was frustrating.
Other critiques were that all the time gating felt too slow to me, I'm already paying 2 HP for training plus the 10 Soul investment, why a timer bar too? Also as demon HP was always 4 I think a "chunked" HP bar works better than a continuous one. Matching the right demon to the job is also a bit of a pain with them running around all the time, a drop down UI to pick an available demon or being able to put them in pens to keep them from mingling would be nice.
Otherwise I really liked the idea and general sense of progression. The "biblically accurate" and\or hellraiser demon visuals but still having cutesy SFX was a nice touch.
Cool zoom indeed.
Pretty art. The abilities need an in-game tutorial, their control scheme was a bit clunky.
I'm guessing that different glyph combinations do different amounts of damage to different enemies, but can't say for sure. If that is the case the game ought to communicate it to the player, and which enemies are weak to which glyphs.
Great juice. Smooshing my dudes together to make the stats go up and see them headbutt the other dudes was very fun. There didn't seem to be a ton of strategy involved beyond maximising stat increases and beneficial traits, and that seemed mostly based on the RNG of what you summoned, but I didn't really mind.
Was a bit annoying if a new summon overlapped another, I accidentally buffed up the wrong skele once.
*my fields!*
**back to hell**
Incredible VA work, had me grinning ear to ear. Gameplay-wise it would have been nice to have some ways to slightly incentivise your units in certain directions, like Majesty (*I'm meeelting*), as otherwise it's kinda just about spamming down spawn buildings. Cool concept, good execution.
@arColm I tuned it down a little, found a bug while I was doing it.
@vegeo Same! I thought my ducky was NKRO but it's just 6KRO.
@meepster Yeah it's an option but it kinda sucks playing on a standard keyboard.
@lexgear Rotate has been a common pain point, I've reworded the tutorial.
@goodwincek Another bug was that there's meant to be a reference that pops up after you finish the tutorial, fixed now. The shaders on the glyphs make them not line up properly with the outline sometimes, there's only two sizes: small or big.
@adam-gallina I was hoping people would just have fun pushing buttons and would find whichever glyph they needed for the current level, but fair enough.
@tommes oops that's a bug. The key rebinding was the last thing I did, so not surprising. Thanks for calling it out. Fixed now.
@el-pepi @thomas-bringer @nycoisdreaming yes, sorry the key rebinding wasn't better implemented. I couldn't come up with an idea I liked better, but I knew that the accessibility would be bad :(
@ugly-robot glad you liked it! I wanted to emphasise the relation between the gestures and the symbols more with animation, like having the index finger and thumb actually make a circle, but alas.
@badur yeah the tutorial images are just static images, key rebinding was the last thing I did and I was a bit braindead.
@hvox oh dear, I'd been assuming I was using scan codes this whole time, I can see how keybinding isn't as useful to non-QWERTY keyboards as I'd originally thought now. Turns out Heaps uses keycodes instead as it's multiplatform and it's different targets use different scan codes, or something like that. Certainly fixable as I'm only targeting javascript, but not quite as straightforward as I'd like. I'll implement it in a post-jam version, along with other suggestions.
Thank you very much for pointing it out, I had no idea just how bad it was.
Not being able to see where you need to go next is quite annoying. The early levels I seemed to have a limited number of cards, but later ones you just get random ones? I wasn't sure. It felt like having just enough cards of just the right kind, in the right order, would make for a tighter puzzle element.
2024-04-15-122530_204x188_scrot.png
It's a shame the view was so zoomed out, the sprites looked interesting but I couldn't really make them out. The gameplay seems lacking in meaningful decisions for the player to make. I just spammed out the entire deck as quickly as I could, since more units on the field will kill enemies more efficiently.
Fighting the skeles felt good, but the input randomness of whether you get a skele or an ingredient from the portals I found annoying. The lack of any sense of progression meant I wasn't compelled to play once I was done soaking up the atmosphere. Which was great, the art and controls were very nice.
Cool art. Couldn't figure out what to do, I assume it's unfinished.
Good art, fun game. The early game felt significantly more difficult than the rest, which is kinda opposite to the difficulty curve you want in games normally. The boss mushroom scared the hell out of me.
Cute and fun. The music was nice too.
**UI**
The resolution being slightly higher than 1080 was annoying, I couldn't see the entire UI at once. Also the tooltips for what new units cost ran off the edge of the screen for the later ones. You can symbols above the units heads for what they were carrying, I would have put that next to the corresponding top left stockpile readouts, to make it clearer what was what.
**Balance**
I died and wasn't sure what I could have done differently, I was already spamming protectors. The late game constant drip of enemies seems hard to get around, maybe more of a wave system would allow you to still get some resources in and rebuild a little. The Protector AI also seems to lead to them clumping up, leaving the units on the other side of the map vulnerable, leading to a death spiral.
Critiques aside, I did like the gameplay loop and general vibe of the game.
Charming visuals and sound. The gameplay felt a bit tedious, since it's just there as an excuse to show off the art perhaps a more streamlined UI would have worked better? Have three questions per juror to select from, automatically move onto the next when you're done, to cut down on the clicking around through menus.
I got double rewards and "delve deeper" buttons sometimes.
Felt very high concept and compelling. Having the goals visible through the maze and eventually being able to see everywhere you'd already been was great from preventing such an elaborate maze from becoming frustrating. Small critique, the text-scroll would start to run off the page before it realised the word was too long and needed a new line, it was a bit distracting.
Found it a little challenging but enjoyable. A downside to the character being so quick is it's hard to admire the art. 2025-04-07-134612_970x588_scrot.png I got stuck on the ceiling when the path splits, but then found out you fall when the game is paused. Experimenting I found you can jump and shoot while paused as well.
Really enjoyed this one. It reminds me of an arcade light-gun game. At first I found the enemies predictably spawning in the same locations and beelining towards you a bit too easy, but once the bats started drifting all over the place it really picked up. I really like slamming the "close door" button to progress the level, but I think the player should be encouraged to do it asap. Perhaps just a timer to encourage finishing the game ASAP, or a souls bonus for completing under a certain time.
Gave me Subnautica prawn suit vibes. Very atmospheric and tense. Critiques ------- - I never managed to hit a fish, a targeting crosshair would be helpful. - was there a certain action needed to pick up resources? I'd mine them and they'd fall apart, but I never seemed to pick them up and have nothing in my inventory when I returned to the surface - there seemed to be some issue with the transparency on the seaweed plants
Overall I really liked it though.
It's rare to see a 3d platformer in a gamejam. It did feel a bit too big and empty, I agree with @patatje that I wish there was a sprint button. I also found the camera occasionally painful, but honestly that's keeping with the tradition of 3d platformers. A great achievement for 72 hours.
Would be nice if the card game rules were explained in-game, or there was a reference there. Really good art and a creative take on the theme.
Cool concept. The platforming was frustrating because of how slidey the character is though. I'm not sure if it's intended that swapping depths can cause the pushable purple cube to jiggle.
@aleksey-salion That's the main menu, yeah. I don't see any errors, but I assumed a 1080p resolution, looks like you've got more than that, so I think the Begin button is off screen for you. Sorry! Something for me to keep in mind for next time. If it is any consolation, since some graphics effects also assume 1080p, the game would look absolutely awful if you could play it.
The layer switching was cool, loved the art but found the wendigo monster quite frustrating as it could appear and kill you with no warning.
2025-04-07-140448_1920x1080_scrot.png Fun game, I like interplay of having to descent quickly to increase stability but then you have to move the earth layers more quickly to avoid collision. Feels tense.
Very similar to my game, but you're clearly a much better artist. :smile:
The pixel art was nice, but the motion blur felt awful to look at. The attack animation of the MC and the enemies had them shrink down, I was confused where the hitboxes were.
Very nice, quite similar to what I wanted to do. I even envisioned a claw-collector before scrapping the idea for being too clunky. A separate light for the claw would be nice, as it's hard to see what it's aiming at once you get deep enough.
Overall nice game. The theme music reminds me of Cave Story. Agreed that the beacons have a creepy vibe, I thought some Neon Genesis Evangelion stuff was about to happen when I saw the first one.
Minor complaints: I had a couple sequencing issues where I immediately dropped the cube through the tall wall so had to run back to get it from the spawn, then mistakenly thought I had to proceed further to get to the second beacon so lost my second gem somewhere. Falling through an infinite space with no point of reference before respawning was also a bit confusing when it happened.
Very nice. I appreciate the console logs.
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> Cars explode after sitting still for too long
It's good to finally know why we invented traffic lights.
Really fun, I liked the blips of cars getting home a lot, very satisfying to hear a little arpeggio as a big line gets home. Controls-wise it'd be nice if you could just mouse close to the traffic signals then use WASD to change them, trying to pixel hunt quickly is fun and engaging but hurts my hand a bit.
I love the inclusion of a passive background mode, reminds me of those carpets with roads on them.
Very original idea, and well executed. The whistles got a bit repetitive so a few variant recordings of them would've been nice, like with the barks and baahs. Radial controls and flocking are both interesting things to play with, intuitive but lots of potential for interesting emergent gameplay.
The room is calm.
Fun little puzzle game. Similar to @yueyao-wang I wasn't always sure what did what but since the levels were relatively simple I just tried things out until I found what was movable\rotatable. I should probably check under my bed for any astrolabes ruining the feng shui.
Incredible.
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I did get the following error in the console a few times when scenes were changing, but it didn't seem to interrupt the game. ``` ERROR: Can't change this state while flushing queries. Use call_deferred() or set_deferred() to change monitoring state instead. at: area_set_shape_disabled (modules/godot_physics_2d/godot_physics_server_2d.cpp:355) C# backtrace (most recent call first): [0] void Godot.NativeCalls.godot_icall_3_1051(nint, nint, nint, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_bool, int) [1] void Godot.Node.AddChild(Godot.Node, bool, Godot.Node+InternalMode) [2] void State.AdvanceMapReal() [3] void State.AdvanceMap(int) [4] void State.HandleOwnChange(int) [5] void State.RaiseGodotClassSignalCallbacks(Godot.NativeInterop.godot_string_name&, Godot.NativeInterop.NativeVariantPtrArgs) [6] void Godot.Bridge.ScriptManagerBridge.RaiseEventSignal(nint, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_string_name*, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_variant**, int, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_bool*) [7] int Godot.NativeCalls.godot_icall_2_1060(nint, nint, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_string_name, System.ReadOnlySpan`1[Godot.Variant], Godot.NativeInterop.godot_string_name) [8] Godot.Error Godot.GodotObject.EmitSignal(Godot.StringName, Godot.Variant[]) [9] void State.AdvanceTo(int) [10] void Lava+<>c.<_Ready>b__4_0(Godot.Node2D) [11] void Godot.Area2D.BodyEnteredTrampoline(object, Godot.NativeInterop.NativeVariantPtrArgs, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_variant&) [12] void Godot.DelegateUtils.InvokeWithVariantArgs(nint, System.Void*, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_variant**, int, Godot.NativeInterop.godot_variant*) ```
Hello fellow waveform enjoyer. The platforming and puzzle interface felt very smooth and polished to me. The camera transitions from room-to-room in particular.
There was a small visual bug when moving around sometimes, a tiny gap appeared between the background tiles. mpv-shot0001.jpg
I found it difficult to progress past the first step, once I parsed what "extra cleared flags" meant. Game felt very juicy.
Nice, has that intuitive feel that well-demonstrated mathematical concepts do. Good work.
Instead of a full-blown tutorial (though one would of course be good, time permitting) just being able to replay the "ping" animation more slowly and showing how each node's shortest path distance is calculated, and how the ambiguous groups are broken up, would probably help it "click" for players.
Fairly fun and challenging. Having to repeat the entire sequence from one failed step is a bit too punishing maybe.
Hello fellow waveform enjoyer. I feel like in a lot of ways this is a more polished execution of the same concept as my game. Some feedback that mine got that I think applies here: it'd be good to have a intermediate screen to see the output after an addition or multiplication, as those can be hard to internalise.
Interesting script\radioplay. The music adds a lot to the atmosphere.
The gameplay of the anomaly leading to a game over wasn't clear until it happened, I thought it was just more flavour.
The windows exe wants a corresponding pck.
Makes me feel bad for all the A* algorithms, get given a straight line heuristic then get trapped in a maze.
The web version hitched a bit for me, which seemed to accelerate the character in whatever direction it was already going. Might be because your physics timestep is set to elapsed time in between frames?
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I liked the difficulty in steering the ship and seeing where you were going, I just think you get thrown into too many enemies too quickly so it's a bit overwhelming at first. It's quite hard to pick up the large amount of resources you need, especially as destroyed asteroids\enemies drop their loot out radially and your turning circle is so large. Controls wise I also often found myself needing to change course while lining up a shot, maybe having left mouse button always be steering and right always be firing would be smoother. A more visual reload indicator (the icon filling up, perhaps) would be useful too as I usually didn't want to take my eyes off the middle of the screen.
Really nice graphics and vibe.
Let's get 'em
Agreed with others that the gameplay's shallow, but it's enjoyable to play through which is much better than it being the other way around.
Always cool to see a strategy game. I suspect the possible moves being random each turn makes it much more a game of luck than skill, though. I liked the simulated mouse moves of the computer opponent, making it clear how it was applying the same game rules as the player.
I like the idea, as @matt-giuca said it's very reminiscent of Papers Please and it's easy to imagine elaborating on it in that vein.
On day three my inbox glitched out and I couldn't progress. 2026-04-20-181738_1154x650_scrot.png
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I took a bunch of hits on the penultimate level so this doesn't actually match what my loadout was for most of the game, haha.
Very nice colour palette. Though I liked experimenting with the different upgrades I would've liked tooltips, or maybe just a "target range" mode, so it was easier to understand what each did. I still hadn't figured out a few by the end. The UX felt a bit misleading as I assumed the towers couldn't fire until their icon finished their animation, but found they fired quite a bit more rapidly when I spam-clicked.
Very cool idea, as others have said. The UI could do with a bit more feedback on what is interactable and what isn't, as the background and interactables look pretty much the same.
Is it even possible to make the various phrases just with the dials? Seems like I was stuck copying out of the recordings, which made me confused why the manual dials were even there.
The unprompted hints were kind of annoying. Having hints is good, but they should be asked for by the player imo.
Great concept, pretty good execution (as far as I got) just needs some UI\UX polish.
Reminds me of Battlezone 2. Agreed with @iluvatar very good polish for a compo game. The camera followed the player a bit too rigidly, and the signal mechanic didn't seem to matter much compared to just usual 3D shooter mechanics. Title music was very bouncy and fun, though the combat SFX were a bit too loud\harsh.
I'm afraid I found the core concept more frustrating than fun, though I see the appeal. A little bit more feedback while recording the inputs (just the sounds of failure\success, perhaps?) might move it closer into the 'fun zone'.
Pretty good Duskers clone.
I found Tony Torial too chatty, with such small windows it'd often push some useful information off screen with flavour text. The dials on the radar and scanner seemed a bit buggy and didn't point where I thought they would.
Interesting concept. The antennas seemed to have different default ranges regardless of the use of boosters, or was that just depending on their distance to the closest jammer? Not knowing what the new range of an antenna would be after the use of a booster was also a bit frustrating. The tutorial could also have been a bit clearer by showing what the antennas looked like in each of their respective states.
I'm not sure the game gains anything by being 3D, and it complicates the control scheme and visuals in what is otherwise a top-down 2D game.
I do really like the idea.
Hello, the itch link is broken. This looks interesting but the scrollbars make the embed pretty hard to play. I'll come back when it's visible on itch.
@theoratkin thanks for the link, very useful now that it's itch that doesn't work instead lol.
Really nice visuals and mood. As others have mentioned I found myself relying on hints after a few levels, despite the distinct geometry of the target objects they were quite hard to find. I'm not sure if they were actually partially buried or if it just appeared that way due to the visuals. Just replayed and scanning with the tightest possible beam it seems that often only a very small part of the object was actually visible.
Obviously hindsight is 20-20, but if I were to do an effect like this I'd add something like additional visuals to show the tangent of the geometry being pinged by the raycasts to give a sense of upcoming crevices and the like that may need to be explored. As it is I was often confused as to the layout of the orbited object, though I understand that is partially the intended experience.
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Hate it when I lose this object in an interior volume >_>
I sure summoned and killed a lot of spaghetti monsters. Not sure why, but it was cool and fun.
The dithered hands in the merchant screen was reminiscent of Felvidek.
Very clever abilities and level design. Certainly feels like potential for more levels with the abilities. The colours were generally a bit dark, though it did make the interactables pop more. A couple of the puzzle platforming segments were a bit frustrating to me, but everyone has different preferences for those. The checkpoints were always close enough that I could retry them pretty much instantly.
Very ambitious concept, the terminal interface reminds me of Duskers and the triangulation stuff of Highfleet. I like the idea, but the execution is a bit clunky. Making a good CLI is quite hard, even for people used to interacting with them. There are silent failures on malformed input which is always frustrating, players' (or users') input should always have feedback even if it's just a generic error message (though the more informative the better).
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Pretty fun. I kept mis-aligning the cursor as I instinctively thought the index finger was the "middle".
The animation and sounds are really cute. Like the others I'm not sure what the objective is. I like the concept, just needs a bit more guidance I think.
A bit difficult, but great concept and execution. One UI complaint is it would've been nice to be able to scrub back and forth through the tapes a bit more smoothly, for example when trying to get the right filtering for Reggie's reply in Reggie 9/3/99.
Hello fellow signal processing enjoyer. Similar to @zakchaos I didn't find the visualisations that helpful aside from vaguely matching the frequency and amplitude, then I just fiddled with the sliders while watching the "look" bar. Really slick UI though, and I like the SETI theme.
Agreed with others that the feedback about how close to "on time" a hit was would be more satisfying, or less confusing. I did really like the voice acting but I think some subtitles would've helped, especially to indicate when it's swapping from helping to hindering.
2026-04-20-141946_957x547_scrot.png Agreed with Mr Flower on the difficulty, mostly I think the game just proceeded too fast to be able to take in the game state and react in time. Managing to space the aliens was really satisfying. The setting was cool, reminds me of Space Station 13 and Duskers. Well done getting a relatively complex simulation done for a compo.
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I did find it easier to just spray down the "chameleon" greens then clean up the reds after, rather than swap to their proper colour. The concept is good though and as @boltdapikachu234 said the player character's sprite animation is really charming somehow.
@absolute-garbage @kzw Whoops itch didn't have the final version, fixed now.
@oadt @tolviere I would've liked to tutorialise each of the components instead of dumping them all at once, but I also intended to leave it a bit mysterious to encourage playing around with them. It's a hard line to balance. I'll add a hint for three to the Itch page.
@fredrik-andersson Thank you! I was originally going to have a sawtooth as one of the base generators, but then realised how silly that would be.
@frib UI is always a weak point of mine. I wanted it to be skeumorphic as well which does also decrease the user experience on top of my weakness in that area. The wires don't actually need to be oriented correctly to connect, that's purely visual, the hitboxes to connect them might be a bit too small however.
@maggardjosh @richjbaron I did notice the knob step-skip in dev and made it a bit less egregious, but didn't have time to completely prevent the issue occurring. Thanks for playing!
@lloydlobo yes the way the signal-splitter was implemented was a bit hacky which leads to it having memory like that. I did initially want to have a latch-like memory puzzle, but there aren't actually enough features in the game at present for that to have an effect on the resulting waveform.
Also amusingly in dev I got some stack-overflows while testing the splitter to have input from it's own output, which I suppose is as close an analogue to a signal feedback-loop as you can get.
Neat concept. I haven't worked with gAI but I would say that the voices felt very calm for a zombie apocalypse, but they served to give variety and get the information across. I'm not sure I agree that
> This does not affect gameplay
The game would feel very random without them. Or maybe you'd just need to stock up on more bullets to deal with not knowing where the safe zones are.
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Hello fellow waveform enjoyer. I can't think of much to say which hasn't already been commented on, seems a clean execution of the concept. Being bounced back to level one on failure is a bit brutal.
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Very cute and meta narrative. I don't think making it 3d changes the Vampire Survivors formula much, but it was interesting to explore around in I suppose.
Good concept, short and sweet. I liked the audio design and the glitchy alien. 🛸 👽️
I couldn't figure out what I was looking for in determining how to flag each of the alien dudes. The art and general vibe was really nice though. Eerie but banal, in a "office-work" sort of way.
Nice work. I like the concept.
A couple of times trains would leave a station right as one was coming in, which felt pretty unfair. Agree with @loig that a more progressive system would be a better player onboarding experience.
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Not sure if there's a mechanic I'm missing, but the collapse seems to happen randomly and is as bad as restarting the system. Seems I need to get lucky and find the matching node in the first few moves (which I haven't managed to do) or restart.
The atmosphere and art are subtly creepy, which I like. Kind of reminds me of Lethal Company.
Fun concept, and a very intriguing whimsical art design.
Agreed with others that it was a bit odd to smash into ships and immediately get a "job well done" screen, though I also found it quite funny. I think failing a level progressing the player to the next level is fine here as there aren't that many mechanics to master. It probably should have a bit more feedback though, from an explosion sprite to variable text on the score screen.
On a related note, the mostly transparent background made most of the text difficult to read.
> IDK why I can’t run my game in this LD website, anyone knows what might be the issue?
The embed guide might help
https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/
Very often it's the resolution being off.
Agreed with @pres2300 that I couldn't tell how the order mattered and was mostly picking things at random, but it was interesting to go into a new scene and try to contextualise everything.
Hello fellow waveform enjoyer. Nice polished graphics and UI.
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I think the rocket explodes on your own shield, not sure if that's intentional or not. Otherwise a really solidly executed concept.
I wasn't totally sure what all the different nodes did, and also got stuck on level 5. Having the solution be on the previous puzzle is frustrating as there's no indication that the different levels depend on each other in that way.
Otherwise an overall enjoyable puzzle game.
The bears ate all but one of my hamsters (╥﹏╥)
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Cute game that explains itself clearly. Nice work.
I liked the rooms where you had to really keep moving to keep up with the router, otherwise it was pretty much a non-factor. Do the big skull enemies basically hitscan you? A small laser blip or the like a moment before they fire would be more satisfying, giving you a reason to use the dodge.
Was a bit confusing but got there in the end. Throwing your flare didn't seem to have any purpose? And no camera control was a bit annoying, though I probably would've gotten even more lost with it on the second desert canyon level.
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The arrows being so slow is a bit frustrating, though it is amusing when you hit your own units by mistake.
Hello fellow waveform enjoyer. Really clean execution of the concept, the dials and audio cues felt really nice to interact with.
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that isn't how I remembered the ending of James and the Giant Peach.