Speed Signal by pkenney
This robot just can't stop!
The only thing you control is the jump key, so I've made it as expressive as I could, and tried to challenge you to use it well. 9 levels after the title screen.
There's a little speedrun timer to add a bit of challenge if you'd like. Speedrunners can press R at any time to restart their run from the beginning. My best run is 2:44.243 but it had many errors.
Current world record holder is sudocoffee with 2:04.922

This was my first jam using Phaser, which I've only tinkered with a bit before. I also used LDtk since I wanted to have an editor.
AI: no art, sound, game or level design was created with AI tools. I did use a mix of hand coding and claude code. Claude was especially helpful in building asset-pipeline tools that transformed data across the LDtk-aseprite-phaser boundaries.
I had fun with this one. By using unfamiliar tools, I learned a lot but also lost a lot of time. I didn't have a satisfactory character controller until halfway through!
I enjoyed making an actual tileset, which I haven't really done before, and putting a bit more effort into the animations and background art.
Biggest regret is that I put a ton of effort into the frenzied baboon, but I didn't really capitalize on his potential. Sorry, pal!
| Link | https://savagehill.itch.io/speed-signal |
| Link | http://savagehillgames.com/LD59/ld59-speedsignal-code.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/speed-signal |
Ratings
| Overall | 23th | 4.069⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 13th | 4.139⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 186th | 3.186⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 244th | 2.914⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 17th | 4.292⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 86th | 3.569⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 50th | 3.429⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 90th | 3.686⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
I may have to come back to this later on and tackle the rest of the levels!
I really loved the sound. @nikiroz took the words outta my mouth — that's exactly how it feels! It's really nice. Don't get me wrong, I love sfxr, but the human touch of little self-recorded sounds is really refreshing, and you used them so well.
Only negative I can really say is that the theme feels like a bit of a stretch.
You clearly spent a lot of time on the character dynamics and general game-feel, and it really pays off. It just makes the whole game feel like a thing of quality; the character has real weight to it and is a joy to control. Because you got this so right, the game is just fun to be in, whatever's happening.
I kinda wanted it to be longer, but I'm just being greedy. It's plenty long for a jam game.
This is the first entry I've played whose author declared use of a coding agent. It's allowed, I know, and it won't affect my rating. I won't lie, I feel a certain sadness, like I'm still jogging along in what is now a motorbike race. But it's the future, and we're never going back. It is what it is.
Anyway, really nice entry. Graphics, audio, gamefeel, all here in spades. Nice one!

and this one is way to hard for me 😔
really like this artstyle 💚
Loved the little breather level the most was a nice touch.
i think you have a really cool engine to explore this and add new objects modularly over time.
really impressive!
would love to see it develop to have 40 levels!
- The audio was really pleasant and made the controls feel much more satisifying.
- There's a bug I ran into where wall bouncing close to the ceiling gets me stuck in that corner somehow. I managed to break free eventually, though.
- The jump distance control felt weird in a way I'm having trouble describing, the best word I can think of is "heavy," like I'm getting sucked downwards the moment I release the key
- I probably wouldn't have minded the re-use of level geometry across levels, but did it *have* to be that floating island thing on the right? It was hard enough to beat the first time, but it was doubly frustrating to have to do it over again (and again!).
This is great. I was constantly being pleasantly surprised by the little things in the level design that were carefully thought through to give nice places to bounce back around after making a mistake, which helped a lot with the frustration of missing a key jump. The focus on finding things to flip my character around kept triggering some neuron built from WAAAY back playing the old 90s game Lemmings.
As usual for your stuff, things are polished to a T. Sounds are appropriately crunchy and on point, the character controller seemed flawless (though I did notice the enemy got stuck on a corner one time), and all the art looks very nice - the tileset turned out really well too! I especially loved the dithered backgrounds. That was a nice touch to lend some depth to the scenes, and the one level that's just a straightway was a great moment to pause and admire the backdrop.
I'll share a few memorable moments:
1. My first time finding a wall jump. I was staring at that segment wondering how in the heck I was supposed to make the jump, and then it dawned on me _just_ as I reached the wall that I could wall jump, and I nailed the segment the first time. I won't pretend to have landed all subsequent wall jumps, but it felt great to grok at the last minute what was going on and pull off the mechanic.
2. I got in a juggling war with the enemy on one of the levels my first run for about 3 minutes. I kept missing my jump and dropping the banana, then failing to time my attempt to grab the banana until a point when the enemy wasn't there. If this happened a lot it might be a bit frustrating, but as it only happened once it was just hilarious.
3. I kept getting annoyed when trying to shave off time at this point on (I think) the third level, where I really wanted to turn around earlier than the end of the ground area, and repeatedly failed to utilize the walls to do a jump and reverse:

Then I _finally_ managed to find that there's a very thin margin jump where you can carom off the very bottom of the first wall, as long as you do a very very tiny tap so you don't bounce right back up where you came from. I didn't spend that much time optimizing the other levels, but it was really satisfying to find a (maybe?) optimal path on this level after much experimentation.

Great work - thanks for the game!
P.S. The 'impossible situations' are really funny, thanks for the R button.

Edit: Just remember two suggestions! Maybe it would be fun to count the number of jumps done per level, so the player could challenge themself to complete with less jumps possible. Also there could be a count for missed jumps, although I don't know exactly how to implement it haha...
Although it has some difficulty, I think that's precisely what makes it fun.
Cool short game, reminds a lot geometry dash but more relaxed ^^
I like cute simple and colored graphics, smooth nice pixel art animations cool palette and funny sound effects. This fits well together and renders a very cool game feels ; the baboon is quite friendly and funny in the end, even if he got my banana away for few times. Even banana animation feels smooth and contributes to a great mood aha. Very nice polish in term of visual and sfx, feels really good ! I only wished there was a little more levels to exploit mechanics, I could feel the urge to quickly design levels and, because i do it too much myself, blind guessed that the right part of level was a bit copy pasted to design fastly :) as @rogual said "I kinda wanted it to be longer, but I’m just being greedy" XDDD. Great work otherwise, especially for a compo !!! congrats !
Did something about 7 minutes at first try, then tried a speedrun and reached 2m10 :)
Cheers !
The gameplay really feels like I control a stupid robot, and the sounds are really fun!
Good job!
The mechanical sound does get a bit like... "too much" soon, echoing in my brain xD
But I do love the gameplay a lot! Hard though for a person like me who loves just pressing jump nonstop and can't help themselves lol. Definitely makes for a chaotic and long(er) playthrough xD
The way I can hold the key longer to determine the height of the jump feels very intuitive too but I did fu** myself over with that multiple times, "overjumping" the platforms or underjumping :')
I've noticed the pretty backgrounds and new visual platform type by the end as well. I think the visual design is quite pretty! I couldn't quite make out what my character is supposed to be and what exactly they are riding. It seemed to me like a guy in a really cool mobile wheelchair x)

The game flew by fast and I had a lot of fun. I did switch tabs to write down my thoughts in the proccess so that might affect the time too, I am not sure if the game was getting paused though. But I wasn't really going for max speed, just for fun ^^
The "enemy" is quite forgiving, I was afraid the 1st time the banana would spawn back where it was. Thank you for making it not too hard :D It still has some impact but not too harsh!
Overall, yeah, super fun ^^ I love platformers and this felt fresh and smooth and intuitive to me. Pretty-looking, imo, too. I would only complain about audio, maybe the SE of the wheels(?) can be made a bit softer, or there could be a few diff sounds, or not constant sound, or did I just jump TOO much? xD Great game tho!! Thank you, I've enjoyed it a lot <3
The art is nice (the angled dithered gradients in the background are a neat touch), and I especially love the sound effects. Every bonk, jump, door, etc. is just a little different, and I think it does a lot to make the game feel alive.
Possibly world record?

@sudocoffee is the world record holder, with @knarf and @justinmullin right behind. I have made a tiny change to help any future speedrunners: 'R' now resets all the way back to Level 1 and zeroes the timer, so that you can abort/restart a full speedrun instantly. I still could not beat coffees time (yet?)!
@rogual (who jogs faster than motorbikes, srsly go check his compo game out and maybe even look at his code) @liam and @tweekus are completely right that the theme is real, *real* weak here. My initial vision included something, but it got cut and I became totally unanchored.
@henk and @justinmullin thanks for reporting the bug. I've shipped a small change that adjusts some geometry to address it. This game groups the tiles into larger meshes in an effort to remove seams that were problematic. But the areas your bugs were in, I had structured them so that seams still appeared and caused some issues. So for example here is the adjustment I made to the corner where the player can spaz out against the geometry, it's just a cosmetic change but it alters the way the mesh groups and fixes the issue:

The enemy guy has invisible cage-walls that constrain him, so I had to do something similar for him:

And I found a way to softlock the game in another spot, where the baboon can knock the banana out of an area, and the player cannot climb back up to get it. So I added this one small platform here so that you can:

It's interesting that all these flaws arose from geometry. I'm not used to doing "level design" per se, so I appreciated that folks mostly enjoyed the level layout.
Except for that one crazy climbing wall a few of you complained about. I know just the one you mean, and I buried my face in my hands watching a streamer fail it over and over. That wall is too hard, my bad. But I've not adjusted that.
@khaotom I've been enjoying Phaser, and I *really* liked LDtk. But it probably wouldn't have been possible to ramp up so fast on multiple new tools w/out some of the AI assistants. I also find the Phaser arcade physics easy to use but the limitation to have only axis-aligned rect or circle colliders was pretty inconvenient at times.
And thanks to @kanity who drew this cool art about the game and posted it:
