Signal Repair Team by filgreen3
PLAY IN WEB
Repair the signal from the comfort of your chair.
You manage a signal repair team. Yellow-suit crews move across your map, restoring broken relay nodes one at a time. The signal must stay up. Your job is to make sure it does.
Controls: Mouse only
How to play:
- MAIL — incoming assignments and field reports
- MAP — active incidents, dispatch crews here
- CREW — personnel status, see who's still breathing
- HIRE — replace casualties
- TRAIN — level up crew to resolve incidents faster
Incidents have difficulty and danger ratings. Send underqualified crew and they'll still fix it — just slower. Higher danger means higher pay, and higher chance the signal comes back but your people don't.
Payroll runs every two days. Unpaid crew won't move. Seven days. Keep the signal alive.
HOW IT WAS MADE
This game was made during the last 48 hours of a 72‑hour jam, where the first 24 hours I just sat and thought about what I wanted to make. I think it was a good idea to allow myself time to think rather than rushing into development. Also, I managed to create a game with a very complex UI, which is kind of new. The game is based on the feeling of responsibility and the derealisation of people hidden behind screens and statistics. Check what you feel when a team does not return from a mission. I hope you like this game as I love it btw!
ART, GAMEDESIGN, MUSIC, CODE - Filgreen3
PLAY IN WEB
| ITCH | https://filgreen3.itch.io/ld-59 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/signal-repair-team |
Ratings
| Overall | 63th | 4.125⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 147th | 3.821⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 132th | 3.857⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 124th | 4.232⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 56th | 4.5⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 33th | 4.26⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 173th | 3.565⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 56th | 4.304⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
I wish the clicker could've been more integrated with the rest of the gameplay. I had expected that increasing click power/autoclick would make time speed up even faster, or increase training rate, or something? But the simplicity is nice too
The gameplay is simple but works well; you soon find yourself coldly calculating whether it’s better to have lots of cheap & poorly trained resources rather than well-trained and effective (but very expensive) ones.
The graphics are great because they let you focus solely on the essentials; that’s a real plus in this kind of game.
Looking at things to improve for the post-jam, I found the screen really small for managing the assignment screen. Perhaps an improvement such as ‘automatic assignment based on skills’ could be a nice addition later on, so we can focus on other parts of the game :)
Gameplay-wise, everything is great, the clicker is absolutely fantastic.
Visually, everything is nice, though I turned off the effects halfway through the game.
It felt a bit lacking in finality.. I think the goal is to last a week, but as an honest player, I skimmed almost all the text (and my English is lousy) and somehow didn't feel like I was making any progress. My point is, if UI had n/7 somewhere, it might have been more visual.
I liked the gradual introduction and the normal onboarding; judging by the screenshots, I was afraid it would be stuffy, but it turned out to be fine.
The unit window and training seemed like they could have been combined.
The unit bars are quite tall, which made it difficult to keep track of who you had and what they were doing when there were a lot of them. It would be cool to see them all with infographics.
And it's hard to hit the crosses.
I tried to farm some money, then I went down to zero. I didn't immediately understand how the economy works; it seems like it all went to taxes.
Then I realized I shouldn't hire thoughtlessly, and things started to improve.
Where can I cash out?
The clicker mechanic was clever, it gave me something to do during short moments of downtime.
And I also liked the leaderboard - the ability to leave your nickname there made the ending feel more personal.
Great game! :D