STAY ON AIR by Ethernal Tech
Keep the signal alive. Keep the broadcast running. Stay on air.
In STAY ON AIR, you take control of a fragile radio network spread across interconnected nodes, towers, and broadcast stations. Your mission is simple… but far from easy:
- Stabilize the signal
- Route it through the network
- And ensure it reaches every transmitter without collapsing
Each node in the network affects the signal differently. Adjust power, frequency, noise, and phase to keep everything in balance. If the signal destabilizes before the broadcast ends… the system fails.
Tips
- Stability depends on three main factors: Power, Noise, and Phase
- Try to keep Stability above 0.95!!
- When adjusting a slider, aim for the position that gives the highest stability value
- Power is usually the most important factor
- Power and Frequency both affect the overall noise, so keep an eye on that balance
- Small adjustments can make a big difference... don’t rush changes too much
Gameplay
- Click and configure network nodes
- Stabilize signal flow across the map
- Keep transmissions alive until the end of each broadcast
- Adapt to increasingly complex networks across 3 unique maps
Community Challenge
We want to see how well you perform!
- Drop your scores in the comments
- Compare results with other players
- Let’s turn this into a community leaderboard right here!
Feedback
This is a jam project, and your feedback means a lot.
Let us know what worked, what didn’t, and how far you managed to push the signal!
Final Message
The signal is fragile. The network is alive.
And everything depends on you staying on air.
Credits
Made for the jam.
All audio sourced from Pixabay.
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/on-air |
Ratings
| Overall | 564th | 3.381⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 728th | 2.81⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 478th | 3.31⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 53th | 4.405⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 463th | 3.69⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 674th | 3.15⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 61🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
I’ll also add some tips to the description to help out.
I know the game can feel a bit complex and not always very clear.
Tip: When you move the node sliders, it affects stability. Power is the most important factor — try to keep it as high as possible. Frequency only matters in certain power ranges, so it’s usually less important.
After testing it over and over, I kind of lost track of how it feels for a fresh player.
Really appreciate the feedback, it means a lot!
Heres my full review:
What I loved:
- The music, holy shit, its really good and so fitting
- The SFX is also super fitting
- Is the map procedurally generated? I was positively surprised that it changed from try to try
- The game play and knob optimizing is really fun, I felt the urge to try again
What felt off:
- The signal quality achieved didnt seem to influence score. It was always +100 per station. I think the signal quality on 1.00 for every step would be an easy way to create more need to balance between time spent optimizing and making it at all.
- The overlay sometimes overlays the stations and they cant be clicked anymore. It works, because you can close the overlay first, but that would be an improvement.
Thank you for making this gem!
This type of game would definitely benefit from a more complete tutorial (hard with the dev rime limit). Also it felt quite annoying that once just I had stabilized some towers, there would be a end of broadcast and again all towers were unstable. Instead there could be levels that get harder and some indication when the broadcast is about to end.
Over all good job👍
Was a bit confusing at first how stability works, but once it clicked it got much more enjoyable. Time pressure also feels a bit harsh early on.
Overall really solid and interesting, just needs a bit more clarity 👍
And you’re absolutely right about the UI... there are 3 maps, and in 2 of them the left panel ends up covering the leftmost nodes.
It does break the flow a bit since you have to keep closing the panel instead of leaving it open.
In hindsight, I probably should have kept the panel always visible and separated from the map, like two independent sections.
Really appreciate the feedback!! it helps a lot, even for future projects!! :smile:
Totally fair on the clarity — the stability system can be a bit confusing at first.
Really appreciate the feedback! 👍
Thanks a lot for the kind words, really appreciate it!
And yeah, that’s totally fair. The game can be quite hard to grasp at first, and I agree it would really benefit from a more complete tutorial (jam time constraints hit hard there 😅).
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback, it really helps a lot! 👍
Thanks a lot for playing, and wow 600 is an awesome score!!
Really glad you enjoyed the music and SFX, that means a lot 🙂
Just to clarify on the maps: they aren’t procedurally generated. I actually built 3 different handcrafted maps, and they’re selected randomly each run. One of them is excluded from the tutorial phase since it’s slightly more complex, so early runs should feel a bit more controlled.
It’s also great to hear that moment when things “clicked” with the signal values, that feedback about clarity is really helpful.
Your point about the scoring is very interesting too. Right now it’s a flat reward per station, but tying it more directly to signal quality (like rewarding closer to 1.00) could definitely add a better risk/reward balance between optimizing and progressing.
And yeah, the overlay issue is a known one, it can interrupt interaction even if it’s fixable by closing it first, so I agree it could be improved.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback, really appreciate it! 🙌
And yeah, you’re totally right, a more differentiated behavior between sliders and clearer visual clues would definitely help make the system feel less like trial and error.
A chill/free mode is also a great idea. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t cross your mind during the jam rush, but I’ll definitely keep it in mind for the future.
Thanks again for the feedback, really appreciate it! 👍
Thanks a lot! Really glad you enjoyed it 🙂
There isn’t a fixed “ending” as such, it’s more of an arcade-style experience.
When you fail 3 times, you get a game over screen with stats showing how many transmissions you completed and your final score.
Really appreciate you playing and taking the time to give feedback! 👍
Thanks a lot! Really glad you liked it!
Yeah, I can see we had a similar idea, it’s always fun to see different takes on it!
Totally agree on the progression, adding more variety with towers/nodes and scaling things up would definitely make it more interesting.
Thanks again for playing and for the feedback, really appreciate it! :smile:
Appreciate it a lot! Happy to hear you liked it!
And yeah, you’re absolutely right, the time progress indicator doesn’t stand out enough against the background. That’s definitely something I missed in the rush of the jam.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, it really helps!!
The idea is fitting to the Theme and well-implemented, congratulation!
My only complains would be more tower types to spice things up (which might be hard to do with limited jam time) and maybe more indicator to know if you are in a local maximum or the global one.
I didn't find the gameplay super engaging, though. It's just moving sliders until a number gets high. The actual graphics and theme of the game are largely irrelevant. There can be some challenge trying to do them all in the time limit, but it's just a measure of how fast you can move a slider. When I saw the waveform visualisers and audio I thought I'd actually need to look at that and try to solve puzzles with the different parametres, but that never really came into play. The idea of stabilising the signals is great, but I think that process could be more interesting. (Maybe some added gameplay with choosing the directions of signals could be neat too? Maybe you need to redirect signals to different towers throughout the game. Just an idea.)
Nice work! This was a fun puzzly experience with some super clean presentation.
Very much in keeping with the Signal theme.
Perhaps there are one too many parameters to adjust, and to be honest I didn't get a sense there was a knack to it; I felt like I was just tweaking the sliders to make the signal stregth go up without much of a pattern or system. Plus there seems to be local maxima you could fall in with no clear indication that you need to change the other sliders.
That said it's all very nicely done and worked very smoothly. With the high number of nodes to fix it actually makes the timer pretty difficult.
Did you use AI to help build this game? It's not a problem with me if you did, I used a coding agent with my entry too, but the seemingly randomly generated map and the nice signal wavefront is the just sort of thing I've found the AI incredibly good at implementing quickly. The polish levels are very high (in a good way!)
Thanks, I’m really happy you enjoyed it!
And yeah, that’s very fair feedback. The system can feel a bit like trial and error at first, especially with multiple parameters interacting and those local maxima you mentioned. It’s something I’d definitely like to make clearer and more readable.
About the maps: they’re not procedurally generated, there are actually 3 handcrafted maps that get selected randomly. With the jam time constraints, doing proper procedural generation felt a bit out of scope.
As for AI, I mainly used GitHub Copilot for small code suggestions and speeding things up here and there, but the design and implementation were done manually.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write such detailed feedback!
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, really appreciate you taking the time!
Glad to hear the presentation, audio, and tutorial worked well for you, that means a lot 🙂
Just to clarify on the maps: they’re not procedurally generated, I built a few handcrafted ones and they’re selected randomly each run.
And yeah, your gameplay feedback is totally fair. The system right now can feel a bit like just pushing values up rather than really engaging with the signal itself. I originally wanted the waveforms and parameters to play a more “readable” role in solving things, but I didn’t fully get there within the jam time.
I really like your idea about redirecting signals or adding more decision-making to the process, that kind of layer would definitely make it more interesting beyond just tuning values.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments, it’s super helpful!!
Thanks a lot, really happy to hear the tutorial worked well for you! That was something I wanted to get right, especially during a jam :smile:
And yeah, both points are totally fair. Adding more tower types would definitely help bring more variety and depth, but as you said, time was a big constraint there.
The local vs global maximum is also a really good observation, right now it’s not very well communicated, and I can see how that can be confusing. Some kind of clearer feedback or hinting system would definitely improve that.
Appreciate the feedback a lot!!
Jokes aside, this is a good game! I lost, but it was fun. Artwork is nice and the tutorial was helpful.
Really happy to hear you had fun with it, even if the time limit was a bit brutal. Glad the tutorial helped too!!