Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → TheGoblinGuy
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | LunaTerm Signal Solver | jam | 641 | 3.23 | 2.95 | 3.28 | 3.66 | 3.52 | 3.38 | 3.57 |
Wow, this ridiculously good of a game for a compo entry. Some gameplay polish, a fancy art-pass, and maybe some levels with different growth patterns and this could easily do well on Steam.
Made it to 171 final population, got relatively lucky with the number of stuff I got. Did get a choice between one single capacity upgrade and two capacity upgrades one time, that was a bit silly :rofl:
Agree with Lexu, just looking at the trajectory is a lot easier than looking at the signals most of the time. But that only takes away a slight bit of the theme-relevance, it doesn't change the fact that it's actually really fun to play. And there's a good variety of mechanics layered on top of the base idea, really good game.
Loved the game. Really impressive getting a full moody and messy environment like this into a jam game. Sound design also did a great job for the tension.
Puzzles were simple but interesting enough, the way they should be in a horror game (nothing worse than losing fear because you're stuck thinking). The response minigame however was a little fast. Then again I think it slowed down on a third attempt(?) and failing it is pretty nice for the tension buildup, so that may all be intentional. Overall amazing jam game.
Managed to beat it all, nice little brain teaser. I agree it'd be nice to be able to undo or even just move the repeaters at will, but I do understand it'd probably make it too easy to just brute force solutions with repeated shuffling instead of thinking it out beforehand.
Bold idea to make a space flight sim in a gamejam, and impressive how well you managed.
It would've been nice if you had managed to attach some gamified goal, be it reaching a a specified amount of money, costing more to refuel than you gain so you can try to get as many deliveries as you can before losing, or some kind of time pressure. But as is, it's still a nice "toy" if you will, fun to play around with for a while.
Small note, the text font seemed really low res to the point of being just a few-pixel blur on my (linux) machine regardless of what I set the resolution to. The "press space to start" on the screen was near unreadable.
@pavel-goncharov WHelp, classic lol. I did my best checking for incorrectly formatted commands, but that one slipped through. Noted for a postjam build I'll make later with whatever else people find that can go wrong, and maybe some bonus content. But for now, if you want to give it another try please always add some arguments after commands as described in their help command. And if not, thanks for giving it a shot in the first place and reporting the bug.
Really wish I had a way to speed up the bootup sequence animation now ._.
Edit: the same is true for the "term" command. Commands require arguments, but forgetting to check for (and give a nice in-game error message) when you don't give any arguments to those two commands is a big oopsie on my part.
@rum-ham Thanks for the bug report. Commands should be case independent, but in my sleep deprived delirium I was manually casting words to lowercase in certain checks, instead of just making everything lowercase to start. Should be fixed now.
More embarassingly, I decided to proofread stuff and discovered a pretty critical line was just left out of a manual page. It was there, in the code, just... unused. While it's technically not needed since the process is described in text, it sure as heck helps in getting feedback on what you're doing.
@tundra Congrats on being (AFAIK) the first person to beat the game outside of me testing it myself. Especially impressive given the mistake I pointed out above. Thank you so much for putting in the time and effort of figuring out my silly little machine :heart:
Thanks for the additional bug reports and feedback everyone! Uploaded a v1.0.3 version where I just did a full sanity check pass on every command, fixing the crashes mentioned and one additional one.
I think that should be the final version, since this *should* take care of all the crashes (fingers crossed), and any other issues I can think of with the game would be more than just bugfixes and thus go against the spirit of the jam. But if anyone else finds any more crashes, please do tell and I'll fix it ASAP.
@matt-swieboda When I mentioned Zachlikes, I wasn't specifically talking about just the ones by the company themselves. Two most notable ones that come to mind are A=B (paid game) and SIC-1 (free! Definitely check that one out). They're both games where everything is done with a single base instruction, but they get incredibly complex.
That said, the original idea ***was*** to unlock both manual pages and some extra commands over time as you connect to other machines, with the commands' actions being doable through signal but just a lot less effort with the new command. All of that ended up being cut due to time constraints from to the usual jam misadventures: a combination of one bad rendering issue costing a few hours to fix, how bad I am at writing, and some time spent on the groundworks for a third password puzzle that didn't make it in. I was honestly glad I managed to finish something playable at all, but that's not unusual is it? :sweat_smile:
@stratcat66 Case in point, that page was probably cobbled together in the last hour of the jam. Not fully sure, it's kind of a blur. But you're absolutly right, it should be C. !>Time to silently push a minor update that stays a secret between you and me, okay? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Like the concept, as far as I've been able to puzzle it together. Fiddling around with the knobs and sliders until something works is always fun. Sadly I can't read cyrillic nor understand whichever language it's used to write in this case, so other than getting all three messages into the I don't know if there's anything I could do. Had fun though.
Love me some horror. Played it twice, forcing myself to stay on the move on the second run which certainly made it more fun. Maybe some slowly chasing (floating?) enemy would have enforced that more, but having both playstyles available for player preference isn't a bad thing either I guess.
I'm getting a "Uh oh! If you're seeing this error, it means I can't find your index.html file." error on the embed on this page. Had to go to itch, where it worked fine.
Holy QWOP, I'm too sleep deprived to do well at this. But it's certainly fun and interesting, I'm checking this one out again later.
Quick summary of my experience so far:
Start the game, take a while figuring out how to get a letter into the PC by following instructions in the description. I think it's a caesar cipher, but while testing I find out there's no backspace. I restart the game thinking I'll work it out on a second try.
On second start, I get a morse code instead. Except the morse code has characters that aren't in the rulebook (--..-- is a comma according to an external website, but not listed anywhere). Translate what's on the screen, hit enter, the first half of the message changes to new plaintext seemingly cut off by what I typed. It's all a little too messy and confusing to really want to continue.
I've bookmarked the game into a LD59 folder and will play it again in a few days since it seems you're working on updating it. You've obviously got a great hook with that amazing art, as evidenced by the amount of comments you're getting. Just needs a lot of work on the execution. Good luck
Played using Wine on linux. Web build refuses to start for whatever reason, might just be a me issue.
Interesting little experience. Can't say I understood much of it in-game, but the story in the description is neat. I think I managed to finish it, a final seeming event happened and spacebar stopped doing anything. Could still hear shuffling when pressing the arrow keys though, so maybe I messed up somehow.
The mood and graphics are certainly the standout categories here, very well done on those.
This is, as the kids seem to be saying nowadays, "absolute cinema."
Hmm. The way I interpret it, the first task should've been Grestio, Aurosia, and New Penstock. But submitting (yellow, blue, cyan) is wrong, and in your answers you say white (no colors added) instead of cyan. The handbook doesn't list any meaning for white, either. Extra logic mistake on top of the missing starter signal?
Other than that, fun little game. Would love to see an expanded version with some nice audio ambiance, perhaps distant war noises and the like, and actual radio messages to make it an actual story. Maybe somehow involve a grid coordinate system and keeping track of things on the map yourself, to spitball some ideas. It's that good of a base idea. Also would probably be nice if the bucket had multiple (3?) uses per time you fill it up, the walk back and forth gets a little tiresome over time :sweat_smile:
!> And I'm only a little disappointed there was no explosion + cut to black screen at the end when we bomb our own location :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: