Signals in Distress by TheKimeo
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.

Mix colours by combining overlapping signals.

Prevent the bots from stopping your distress signal.

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
| Itch DL | https://thekimeo.itch.io/signals-in-distress |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/signals-in-distress |
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🗨️ |

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!)
feels like it has strong potential, just needs some visual choices to fully bring the idea to life.
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.
Overall it feels very polished!
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: