Signals in Distress by TheKimeo

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

Signals in Distress

Ludum Dare 59 - Jam Submission

Defend your distress signal against incoming robots by powering up your radio transmitters! Redirect and combine frequencies to match those of the droids, causing them to malfunction and trigger their self destruct.

3 main levels of varying challenge with over 30 rounds to puzzle your way through and beat.

White.png

Mix colours by combining overlapping signals.

Banner.png

Prevent the bots from stopping your distress signal.

Beams1.png

Use a combination of different radio towers to split, move and expand the signal to solve each wave.

It was a fun challenge for our team creating this, and we had a good time with it! The final few hours we did have a UI hiccough and we had to revert some work sadly, there's also only a download and no web version due to a GPU shader critical to our game; but lessons learned for the future.

If you've read this far, thanks and we hope you enjoy our game! :D

Programmers: James Kime, Jonathan Keslake, Edd Brookes

Art and design: Max Corke, Oscar Hagan

Sound and music: James Digby

Ratings

Overall 124th 4⭐ 38🧑‍⚖️
Fun 195th 3.73⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 95th 3.946⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Theme 142th 4.203⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 560th 3.473⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Audio 209th 3.8⭐ 37🧑‍⚖️
Mood 633th 3.264⭐ 38🧑‍⚖️
Given 58🗳️ 65🗨️

Feedback

Derek Glennon
Apr 21st · 03:24 UTC
Holy moly you made quite a bit of content for this jam! Impressive! The game was really clever. My only nitpick would be that I tend to like a fast forward button for the enemy movement in these types of games haha Well done though
LDJam user 384829
Apr 21st · 03:41 UTC
Cool game! It's very innovative, and the graphics are amazing. Well done!
Awwwz
Apr 21st · 09:16 UTC
love the idea of color mixing!the mechanism seems to have great potential, but the street scene looks a bit dim and lack of dull, maybe try to think of a method (like using special shader?) that can highlight the signal color and make the image look vivid at the same time? very interesting game!
roccay
Apr 21st · 10:19 UTC
Nice, detailed tutorial, interesting mechanics, and really impressive music! :)
kayrum
Apr 21st · 12:27 UTC
Great tutorial. Reminds me of Mann vs Machine.
Rocotos
Apr 21st · 14:13 UTC
Great game with solid, polished look and feel. The graphics, the sound - everything is combined neatly and works as one package, not distracting from the idea. Tutorial is great, but the game is definitely a complicated one, especially when you are not used to the puzzle genre. Haven't completed yet, but will return to it later!
Janku
Apr 21st · 14:48 UTC
Wow. I could write a lot about this game. First of all, love me some tower defense, even in literal sense xD But you included so much of the theme into the game design and all of the tutorials, explaining how the game operates (super well done!), but also so much level design has been done and so many levels where I actually have to think for 5-10 minutes to figure out perfect setting that will stop specific types of enemies and cover all 3 dots? Thats insane amount of work and its so well done it feels like a crime to download it for free. I got to level 10, but I had to give up, cause I just have no time to go through it all today and yet there is still so much fun to be had with this game! I have no feedback to give, apart from the obvious - ui graphics. Other than that models are dope, I love how 3 hp enemy animates, its juicy! :D Would love some more simple textures and... that's all? It's more than perfect for a jam! Great job!

![Zrzut ekranu 2026-04-21 164014.png](///raw/179/d3/z/7200e.png)

Some screenshots for proof of how far I got, I hope its not too much of a spoiler, although this level was one of the easier ones (still took me 3 minutes to figure out!)
Matth-ew
Apr 21st · 16:03 UTC
Clever onboarding. Short, simple, and to the point. You managed to do a lot with a few elements! I had a lot of fun with the game, and feel like it's pretty well polished for a game jam.
summerfield
Apr 21st · 16:24 UTC
wonderfully clever game, great tutorial, particularly impressed by the audio
TheDugnutt
Apr 21st · 16:54 UTC
This was great! Very nice concept with a lot of depth. Really fun gameplay as well. Great job!
Stormdrill
Apr 21st · 16:55 UTC
Great result! Just a little more work and it’ll be ready for release
MajoMirez
Apr 21st · 17:04 UTC
Amazing game! I love the color theory + tower defense approach, also the tutorial is super useful. There's potential for a full release game here. I would add a speed up button, since there's nothing to be done once the wave starts, but overall it's a great game!
half-animal-half-beast
Apr 21st · 17:21 UTC
nice interpretation of the theme! i like how the game uses color theory in the mechanics. it would be great to see that reflected more in the visual design as well, not just gameplay.

feels like it has strong potential, just needs some visual choices to fully bring the idea to life.
Dywanix
Apr 21st · 17:57 UTC
cool concept!
OLEGATOR0270
Apr 21st · 18:28 UTC
One of the best logic games on this ludum
Portalis
Apr 21st · 20:13 UTC
Really impressive submission, my #1 so far
ofoof
Apr 21st · 23:07 UTC
This game was super awesome. My biggest issue was that many times it felt like I had the right (or a right) solution, but it took me much longer to finish the level because I needed very precise placement for enough area of color over the lanes. I felt this was most prominent when I needed many signals in one spot, which became common due to how the level layout had limited overlapping choke points. There was usually one spot where all signals overlapped, and not too much overlap besides that, or it was very close to the other area that needed large amounts of signals, or could not be used due to lack of splitters/towers. Three solutions to this I can think of would be
1. Change the way the levels are designed somewhat so that a more diverse amount of areas are viable for tower placement, such as multiple chokepoints with different lane overlaps so that there can be multiple configurations of where you might place your emitters for more thoughtful tower placement
2. Add traditional tower defense game style upgrades such as area size or damage rate so that clearing a level might depend more on upgrade allocation than pure precision.
3. Add some kind of toggleable grid so that placement can be determined by calculating positions rather than just trial and error. The reflectors became a little bit annoying to use precisely because of how the reflection plane did not rotate in the center of rotation.

Despite how I just wrote a ton about this issue it wasn't too much of a hinderance in having fun, and after having finished both levels 1 and 2, I am excited to play through level 3. The mechanics of this game were very unique but came pretty naturally. The quality of the game too is very high, and I see it as a game that could be fun to play for a very long time if it had the levels for it, but for a game jam the content and level amount blew my expectations out of the water anyway.
Gecko64
Apr 22nd · 04:03 UTC
Very fun concept and puzzle system. I love having to combine the colours in a challenging wave type of game. Overall a fun puzzle game, good job!
skale
Apr 22nd · 19:13 UTC
Combining colors as a puzzle mechanic is really fun. With a bit more polish, this could easily look like a solid Steam title!
VenomousMouse
Apr 23rd · 11:45 UTC
Very nice idea and concept. I love how the bots look. Great game!
borjaparraga
Apr 23rd · 11:45 UTC
Some quality content here!
UniOwl
Apr 23rd · 12:05 UTC
Soundtrack is absolute banger, also liked the mechanic of combining colors. Somehow I forgor that overlapping emitters combine their signals, took me a while to complete some levels, but managed to get over it (with help of hints). overall pretty good entry!
LDJam user 4312
Apr 23rd · 15:49 UTC
Loved to crack each level! Took me a while to get it started and had issues sometimes getting the precise positioning but it felt super rewarding when you finally finished the level. I'd have loved to have some indicator which color actually is applied to a dot sometimes it felt like the dot was inside the area of a color but it wouldn't trigger.

Overall it feels very polished!
Soul Grinder
Apr 24th · 15:07 UTC
You've managed to do quite a lot with this in just 72hrs well done! The tutorial was great the colour mechanic mixed with tower defence was fun too, good work!
nexusasx10
Apr 24th · 16:19 UTC
Cool tower deffence game! I like the idea of color mixing cause it makes gameplay very repeatetive. Also music is nice, give some vibes of old strategy games.
Zathnic
Apr 25th · 00:57 UTC
Interesting, unique idea for a tower defence, especially with the color mixing!
Ethernal Tech
Apr 25th · 13:24 UTC
Really impressive entry, especially the amount of content you managed to include!

The color-mixing + tower defense mechanic is very clever and the tutorial is super well done. Great visuals and audio too.

A speed-up option during waves could help pacing a bit, but overall fantastic work, feels like a full game already! :smile: