Connect the Universe by alstegodev
Hello there,
this is my second time participating in the Ludum Dare Game Jam.
This time the theme is "Signal", so we are going to the stars and help the planets relaying some important messages.
Your objective is to deliver a message to all planets. Those planets are unfortunately not very cooperative, so you need to stay on top of them, so that they will relay the message to their neighbors.
Once a planet gets their message, it is no longer responding to any additional messages and will not send new messages either.
Controls:
Hover over planets, so they will relay the message
Click on the Planets to reset them, if there is no more way for the signal

Feel free to give feedback and i hope you have some fun.
| Github | https://github.com/alstegodev/LD59-Signal |
| Link | https://alstegodev.itch.io/connect-the-universe |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/connect-the-universe |
Ratings
| Overall | 138th | 3.5⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 151th | 3.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 95th | 3.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 83th | 4.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 143th | 3.5⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 157th | 3.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 168th | 2.233⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 202th | 3.132⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
Good job!
The background music is a bit repetitive, but the atmosphere and the style is fun. I think the most difficult part with a game like this is to communicate the rules effectively to the player, perhaps via a simple tutorial level?
The most fun game I have ever played in ld59! I'm really curious how many levels there are in total! It feels like the levels could easily be procedurally generated.
During levels 1 and 2, I initially thought it was a pinball or brick-breaker type of game where you had to figure out the signal timing gaps and click all the signals within that window. But after failing level 3 a few times, I realized the actual strategy was to just track a single signal and let it traverse all the planets.
This immediately reminded me of the Graph Theory I learned in my Discrete Mathematics class—it's essentially a directed graph where you have to visit all the nodes! It also made me think that if all the levels are about finding a Directed Hamiltonian Path, it would really test the player's mechanical execution.
Also, did you implement an anti-spam clicking mechanic to stop signals from spreading? Personally, I find frequent clicking on planets easier for moving my mouse to the next target compared to holding the click, but I noticed that doing so sometimes turns them red. Honestly, it's an interesting quirk and a totally acceptable design choice.
However, I feel like a few mechanics could be expanded or clarified. Sometimes, a planet with only an in-degree and an out-degree of 0 (like a sink node) would cause me to fail because my default assumption was that it would continue propagating the signal to adjacent planets.
Additionally, I recall a really cool moment where a signal passed right through an intermediate planet to reach a farther one. It would be awesome to see that specific interaction happen more often!
The game's music is also very rhythmic and really helped me get into the flow of the gameplay. Thank you for creating this game!
Overall though really neat experience, but it gets overwhelming fast.
Anyway, this was a lot of fun! I'll admit that it took me forever to understand how the game works - reading it again, the controls clearly state you need to be hovering a planet for it to transmit signals, but for some reason that was super unintuitive for me. Sill, once I got it, the game was great! I spoiled myself by reading Deng's comment when trying to understand how to play, so I followed their strat of following one signal at a time and it worked really well :) Still, it was very far from easy, especially in the later levels! 15 was the highlight for me - having to follow the signal for the entire bottom-right circle, only to eventually return to the very beginning and then do the entire left side much more smoothly was super cool design! It did take me dozens of attempts and I hated it at points, but it was *so* satisfying finally completing it :)
I did have some pain points though. The main one was the lack of ability to view where will the signal travel to from each planet - it did add an element of memorization to the game, but with so much going on already it felt like too much to me. The other thing is that it was super easy to just barely miss hovering a planet, especially the small ones, and that always felt bad. I feel like slightly extending their hitboxes, or maybe keeping a planet hovered until you hover a different one, would help immensely.
That aside though, I still had a lot of fun, and am pretty happy with how many levels I managed to beat :) Overall, very cool entry!
Cool music.
I got to level 13, it seems like the levels might be infinate.
Less levels and a timer for highscores would have been cool.

But overall, graphics and music complemented nicely this simple in concept but fun game. But for the length of it, audio was starting to get too repetitive. Maybe some variation in that would be needed?
Instructions where ok, they didn't overwhelm me but they didn't exactly prepared me for the first two levels, either. I think I understood mechanics after 3rd level, which isn't bad but imo short tutorial could potentially improve that.
And after I got it, I slowly started to get the hang of it and developing certain rhythm. So in that sense it resembled music games. It also reminded me the type of games where you need to remember sequences (of lights, for example). As here with each replay of the level you where slowly finding your own path with trial and error. Until you executed the remembered sequence perfectly. And it is fun aspect of the game! I also liked the freedom in this path creation, you could choose to follow different planet at the start, to go back, etc. Especially in later levels, after few failures, I was changing my approach, trying to go different way to maybe finally breakthrough.
I've reached 22 level, as the layout differs from the Deng's comment, I assume that it's endless game, it would be cool to somewhere acknowledge that.
