Signal Singularities by DrSmey

[raw]
made by DrSmey for Ludum Dare 59 (JAM)

Play the game in full-screen on the itch.io page linked below!

Signal Singularities is a decoding sandbox game where you receive signals of characters from other games and have to restore their original meaning after increasingly difficult distortion. For decoding, you have a set of interfaces at your disposal that can be arranged and wired together in any way you see fit.

Play around with the signals, try to reach absurd signal complexity levels by successfully decoding multiple signals in a row or just enjoy clicking around to enjoy all the sounds and particles.

Controls:
Open the menu at the top-right to spawn interfaces from a selection. Try them out, they all do different things!
Left-click on a blue output to start a wire and left-click on red input to connect two interfaces with each other.
Right-click while wiring to cancel or right-click and interface to destroy it and all of its wires.
Connect the correct signal to the bottom right device and hit the check button to progress.

Credits:
DrSmey - Programming, Art, Design
Noctiluca - Art, Design
Tyrrer - Audio, Music

Ratings

Overall 170th 3.929⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 379th 3.447⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 115th 3.9⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 251th 4.026⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 229th 4.125⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Audio 213th 3.789⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Humor 295th 3.167⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Mood 321th 3.8⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 41🗳️ 14🗨️

Feedback

LDJam user 424535
Apr 21st · 08:30 UTC
very stylish! the level of polishing and gameplay is commendable! thank you for the experience!
🎤 DrSmey
Apr 21st · 11:19 UTC
@toshiy You're welcome and thank you. We intentionally kept the scope very manageable to focus a lot of effort on polish <3
LDJam user 82995
Apr 21st · 17:19 UTC
This game blew my mind a little bit. Actually my favourite game of the jam so far. Kudos to the team who made tis!
The Stage Hand
Apr 21st · 17:31 UTC
Very good, both with gameplay and graphics!
LDJam user 276593
Apr 21st · 17:40 UTC
Torn between 5 stars for a great concept or 1 star for the fucking UWU node 😂

Jokes aside, I absolutely love this. There are tons of games this jam that are some variation on "decode a signal" but very few of them, so far, are as interesting as this.

Took me a minute or two to work out what was actually being asked of me - maybe some kind of tutorial that describes what each node does would be good, but then again, maybe not, the discovery is highly compelling - but once it clicked I had a huge shit-eating grin on my face for the rest of my play time.

UI and UX all really good, enjoy the exploding menu panel a lot. Sound all good.

The ability to pan around and have more nodes would be good. I dunno if I'm just shit at the game but later in my play session I ended up juggling lots of nodes - looked like one of those software packages that let's you wire synths together!

Great job. Think this will be my favourite game this jam.
🎤 DrSmey
Apr 21st · 17:51 UTC
@teddyreid Thanks a lot. Yea a lot of your points of improvement are extremely valid. It becomes very cluttered very fast and its a little jank to organize everything in so little space.
But if that's the only thing that ends up being a bother to people the I'm fine with it^^

Glad you enjoyed your time <3
kremlebot
Apr 21st · 19:22 UTC
Cool work, but after a three-day jam it's hard to play such games.
🎤 DrSmey
Apr 21st · 19:47 UTC
@kremlebot Very relatable^^
MajoMirez
Apr 21st · 21:35 UTC
Interesting idea! Maybe the controls are too sensitive to me, it was hard to move the slide to the exact position. The art and its palette colors are super cute
🎤 DrSmey
Apr 21st · 22:00 UTC
@majomirez Thank you!
The controls should be easier in fullscreen, and if that doesn't help you can also use the scroll wheel ;)
LDJam user 371996
Apr 22nd · 03:11 UTC
I love the animations and audios when doing some interact with the modules, they are so juicy! And the sci-fi pixel arts are really to my taste. I like this vibe so much ! :purple_heart: :sparkles:
LDJam user 148539
Apr 22nd · 22:39 UTC
The art and music are very good, I was a little confused about what to do, but I was impressed by the scope and ambition.
squimmy
Apr 23rd · 02:29 UTC
I really enjoyed this. I keep getting stuck and then leaving it for a while and coming back to try again. Is there a win-screen or does the complexity just keep ramping up indefinitely?

I also thought the polish was great. the effect when destroying a node is particularly fun.
JerryWest
Apr 23rd · 04:11 UTC
It took me some time to figure out how to play. After understanding the gameplay, I found the process of building circuits to decode very interesting. What a cool idea!
However, as a non-native English speaker, understanding their sentence is quite challenging for me. Maybe some hints could be given when players get stuck to tell them what the correct answer is? Even following the answer to decode still poses a challenge.
I got to the third level, "I'm a total trash mammal and nothing is ever going to work out." I felt a great sense of achievement when I decoded it!
But the next level's puzzle totally blew my mind, lol.
sledzik
Apr 24th · 01:06 UTC
intersting entry. I realy like the sprites of the components and the music is fun
Jacky San
Apr 27th · 16:01 UTC
Wow, incredible entry ! Very nice game :clap: :pray:
Le Don
Apr 29th · 15:37 UTC
Great game! The idea and the polish are amazing. There could be some improvements about the handling - sometimes I would grab something not intended and it also seems removing one item in the middle of a chain reset or remove some of the adjusted values. Maybe some kind of silhouette around the item that is about to be grabbed might be helpful. Also a small tutorial or some explanations for the items might be also helpful, as I am still not sure what all of them did.

But again, this game is great and one of my favorites so far. I think I got to complexity 4 and had to deal with two encodings in a row, which got too hard to solve for me.
JuanRod707
Apr 29th · 16:03 UTC
Amazing game, kept me playing for more than an hour. I think some of the puzzle checks are bugged out because I clearly had the right message at the end (complexity 4) but it wouldn't validate.

Overall, amazing game!
Alexanrd
Apr 29th · 16:24 UTC
Cool visuals and music, a bit hard to understand what to do at the beginning