The game is little unpolished, but I like the concept and the graphics.

Interesting game. At one point I got data "ALUNBE" but despite my attempts to write it and submit, it told me the data was wrong.

@oradimi yeah, I should have added a list of all the original satellite names somewhere. I updated the project itself and published on itch.io. Also added that list in the description here, so if you're interested, you can try again. And thanks for the feedback!

Nice game! I love signal mechanic and decode morse code

Nice entry! I liked the retro style, the music and the mood. However, I wasn't able to get past the first morse code entry. When I was typing the entry box would go away before I was done, then I'd have to tune the frequency, it would come back, I'd start typing, and then it would go away again. The one time I finally got it, it turned out there was a dot I hadn't seen that overlapped with the starting bracket. Anyway, having the entry box always visible instead of just sometimes vanishing or controllable by the user feels like it would have been helpful.

@onedozenbagels Glad you liked the mood! Regarding the entry box: it was designed to close automatically to keep the player focused on maintaining the signal, but now I understand that the timing can be tricky when the frequency isn't stable. Thanks for the feedback! :D

I liked the fond and it's effect, it really suits the gameplay <3

Good game with a cool concept and good vibes. It took me a second to get the hang of it but it was fun when I did.

I agree with the person above about the UI being a bit inconsistent so I had to fight with it a bit. Another thing that confused me at first is the font can be a bit confusing. I kept reading the "7" as a "1" and when I first saw the dash for the morse code hotkeys, I thought it was a comma at first. I kind of wish is was a comma because typing "," and "." would have been a bit easier to type. One last tiny thing I'll mention is it would have been nice if the numpad enter button also worked for entering the answer for the numerical IDs.

That's a lot of feedback but I did like the game a lot. Nice work!

I liked the simple design.

The UI could be improved a little. The tutorial font overlays the main screen making it a bit hard to read. The font in general is not ideal. It's easy to misread some letters/numbers under time pressure.

Going from signal tuning to entering the data felt a little clunky at times. The field where you enter the data covers the signal slider, and sometimes it took some time to disappear, even though the signal had moved already, so it made you lose some time before you could adjust the slider which felt annoying. Could probably be made more by placing the slider such that it's not covered by the data entry.

Idk if you're thinking about turning this into a bigger game. You could then probably juice up the mechanics a little, by making things light up and shake and make more sounds when you establish a connection and when you successfully decipher something.

I quite liked the simple premise of decoding satellite signals. Would've been fun if there was a twist at the end that the messages you decode turn out to be about something else. (Although maybe there is and I just missed it).

Great concept! Lovely art!!

Had a lot of fun with it. I think the mood and style is great. Game has a real nice computer terminal feel.

I'll parrot a lot of what other people are saying and say I had a lot of issues with the font. Was getting 1s and 7s mixed up and really struggled with figuring out what a dot/dash/space was when it came to those buttons for the morse code section.

Ultimately, it's a minor issue in what I felt was an interesting concept that built upon itself as the game went on.

Really good for a solo jam entry. Congrats on finishing your first Ludum Dare! You should be proud of this! Keep making cool stuff!

I liked it! Nice effects and interesting gameplay. Though I would say the difficulty ramps very quickly after the first day. I would prefer having more time to decipher the morse code. Now I had barely time to look at the message and then start decoding with UI (for some reason - was not recognized).

Good work!

EDIT: Where is the confirmation sound from?

@coderaurus
Thanks for the feedback! I plan to make another update in the future and simplify some things. As for the sound, all the sounds I used can be downloaded here: https://shapeforms.itch.io/shapeforms-audio-free-sfx

The slider frequency matching is really cool! I get very Papers, Please kind of vibes from this with having like a couple of simple tasks to juggle for each signal. I get the sense the some of the morse code levels the trick is to just try to get enough letters to make a decent guess at which of the registered names you're going for rather than the whole string - I'll have to give that a try next time I have a go! Great fun, and a well put together and coherent atmosphere, if I had any criticism, it'd be that the tutorial / narrative text sometimes overlaps the monitor text and because both fonts are green it can be a bit hard to read (in the spirit of total fairness, I did have quite a bit of light on my laptop screen while playing this, which definitely didn't help, and is well out of your control :smile:)

@jhax Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you liked the game! Regarding Morse code, this method of playing is probably the best one under the current conditions. After I posted the game and started testing it myself, I was playing with this tactic, but I think it would be better to actually change how Morse works. The point about the tutorial is good; I think overall I could have done it better, but I didn't know how people even make tutorials. I want to update the game to address all the points I was told about :D

That's an interesting concept. I've run into the problem a couple of times where the game doesn't accept my input, even though I entered the correct answer

Hahah oh mannnnn

In retrospect, it should have been clear what YAVIKERL was, but my brain is just not wired for that kind of processing, somehow. My wife loves that kind of game but for my I just sit there blankly staring. So doing it under time pressure was really really difficult for me!

I did get lucky with a run that was not so hard, and I encountered easier words that were not scrambled or were only minor scrambled on the first instance of seeing them, and that run I did really well. Then I graduated over my head into the morse code, and lost the signal in the middle of transcribing a ten-digit code, and I needed to exit the typing mode to go back to adjust the frequency so I hit ESC but this just exited fullscreen and I lost my sh1t and ...

Ok, phew. Game is supposed to be hard!

This was a cool collection of mechanics that came together into an interesting experience. The overall look was slick, and the sound was well done. I know this kind of descramble is like popcorn for some people's brains, and I bet they're having a ton of fun with it.

Cool entry, even if it was a little against the grain of my brain.

@roman-novikov Thanks for feedback! I guess it might be because you accidentally might have left a space at the beginning or end, since the input field in the version here doesn't take that into account