Destructive Interference by Rakthalekk

[raw]
made by Rakthalekk for Ludum Dare 59 (JAM)

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Description

In the year 2XX4, music of all kinds has been BANNED except for the tracks approved by the all-mighty Regime of Exclusive Songs To-listen-to (R.E.S.T.). Play as a member of the Rest-istance, an underground organization of musicians determined to cancel out the obstructive tunes of R.E.S.T through Destructive Interference (look it up).

In each track of the game, you'll need to cancel out instruments by playing a matching waveform - sine, square, triangle, or saw. Reach the goals for each waveform in a track and you'll successfully defeat the EVIL music!!

-> An updated web build with fixes and adjustments is available on itch.io.

Gameplay Tips

  1. If your gain is getting too high, focus on dodging with Jump/Move! Gain goes down over time, so you can always dodge to recover.
  2. Each rhythm matches a part in the song. If one part sounds easier to play, try to hit that one first!
  3. If one difficulty is too hard, try a lower difficulty to get more familiar with the rhythms!

Controls

| | Keyboard | Controller | |----------|-----------------------------------|-------------------------------| | Jump | Space / Up / W | Dpad Up / Joystick Up | | Move | A  & D / Left & Right Arrows | Dpad LR / Joystick LR | | Pause | Esc | Start | | Triangle | H | (xbox) Y / (ps4) Triangle | | Square | J | (xbox) X / (ps4) Square | | Saw | K | (xbox) A / (ps4) X | | Sine | L | (xbox) B / (ps4) Circle |

Screenshots

Screenshot 2026-04-22 001304.png Screenshot (38).png Screenshot 2026-04-22 001943.png Screenshot 2026-04-22 24242.png Screenshot 2026-04-22 001622.png

An updated web build with fixes and adjustments is available on itch.io.

Ratings

Overall 229th 3.85⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Fun 406th 3.4⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 505th 3.263⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Theme 559th 3.447⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 15th 4.7⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Audio 38th 4.237⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Humor 191th 3.474⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 327th 3.789⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Given 10🗳️ 18🗨️

Feedback

sebastianscaini
Apr 21st · 16:43 UTC
Really polished and I love the art style! I think the control scheme would be better on a controller though!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 22nd · 04:02 UTC
@sebastianscaini Thanks for the kind words & feedback!
Perovic2018
Apr 22nd · 04:02 UTC
Very cool art
TheJester32
Apr 22nd · 16:39 UTC
sick art and fun to play
wallmasterr
Apr 22nd · 16:41 UTC
realy fun game , realy polished. fun tracks too
also realy hard, found it dificult whenever i had to move 2 spaces away and obg arg mode.
my brain just keped forgeting what color was what butotn ocs it didint match my xbox vontroller. mabie having the buton as a nsew on the note could make it lless confusing of not a bit more buisy
Pavlo04
Apr 22nd · 16:44 UTC
The graphics are amazing. I'm really digging the art style!
LDJam user 346943
Apr 22nd · 16:52 UTC
Woah that was so cool! I like the artstyle I like the songs! ..and you even got multiple difficulties in? (I really struggled with very hard! I could only do hard, quite easily to be fair, but very hard really was so much harder!)
But the concept is so cool, but I had struiggles with reading the notes properly, them having different waveforms is a nice idea, but I think the short notes should just be colored squares and the slides, where you have to keep pressing need some lengthy "bar" with the color on the grid so its easier to read (and in these bars you could still animate these wave lengths to keep the theme easily imo!)
Also when there were multiple colors the icons/colors were somehow hard to read properly for me on a whim, them being multi colored full on squares might help but I'm unsure, made it somewhat hard for me to play the last very hard level at least I thought!
Oh and also the jump did not feel intuitive to me, I basically never used it except I really, really had to. I also noticed there were quite some bars/sliders that started before those thorny branch things and then even went further underneath them, but there's no waty for me to jump and hold a note so I didnt know if I did something wrong here and missed something or if this was a genuine bug 🤔

But really cool game I'm impressed you guys pulled this off in just 72 hours! Wow!
Sariiger
Apr 22nd · 16:54 UTC
Amazing game! It feels so polished, the music, art, gameplay, everything feels so smooth.
Managed to beat all 3 songs on very hard, it was a really interesting and enjoyable take on the rhythm game genre!
Antti Haavikko
Apr 22nd · 17:28 UTC
Nice! Beat all the levels on all difficulties without too much difficulties after getting the hang of things.

I'm a big fan of rhythm games. Played a huge bunch of different ones after finding DDR in the switch of the millenia. I've kinda gone full circle with them and are mainly just playing ITGMania anymore. Felt kinda weird to have the lane picking and colors just being fixed to keys. I constantly had the check the key/color map while playing to make sure which was which while changing colors. Would probably be a lot easier on PS controller where the shapes seem to match. On xbox controller though, the colors are the same as the buttons but they do not match. Would probably make more sense to have the shapes map to PS controller shapes and the colors to xbox button colors to have more of a support for both.

Would probably need some sort of scoring to prevent cheesing and playing all too safe by taking the lanes one at a time. Another small annoyance I had was that there was quite a lot of just waiting all too often. Especially on the ends of songs where you had to just wait for some specific color note to appear. Probably the only use for the jump button though as the noise lanes left behind could sometimes not be dodged any other way like normally they like 100% can.

![Screenshot 2026-04-22 at 19.50.11.png](///raw/1e4/3/z/7250c.png)

Lovely art style. Though very bright and busy, it didn't feel too distracting. Sometimes the speech bubbles were covering the side lanes which was a bit annoying. And of course I would like to see more animations on the character portraits instead of just stiff single frames but of course jam schedules can be tough to squeeze such niceties in.

I would have really preferred for the songs to fully play instead of you "playing" the instruments. It makes it so much harder to get into the groove of the song you don't know, can't fully hear all the time and are constantly switching between different instruments.

Anyways, good job! 👍
Thomas Gelman
Apr 22nd · 17:42 UTC
@stealthorc Thanks for the awesome feedback!! You bring up some great points, these are things we've been thinking about particularly after we submitted haha. Particularly with the chords where you need to press both icons, the readability could be improved a fair bit, and if notes all had a bit more space between them (tap vs/ hold) it would be easy to maneuver around. Also, the dodge is particularly intended for the white noise once that spawns in, but is also meant as a way for the player to have an easier time dodging if their gain meter gets too high. Hope this all makes sense!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 22nd · 17:49 UTC
@antti-haavikko Thanks for the super detailed feedback! Great to get a big rhythm game fan leaving commentary on the game haha.

You bring up some great points. Particularly for the controls, admittedly, the scheme for controller was thought of based on the PS4 inputs due to them mostly lining up perfectly with the waveforms, and the xbox scheme is just the matching button positions on that controller which is just handled automatically by the engine. But the colors lining up would be a great thing to leverage! There *might* be a good way to detect Xbox vs Ps4 in godot but in the time-frame we had it just didn't quite happen.

Also, the songs do play fully even without your inputs, the SFX for each note is just the same waveform matching the pitch which is why it sounds louder. Hope that makes sense! There was an idea to replace each part with a recorded part on another instrument but we ran out of time for that haha.

Thanks again for the feedback!! It's very insightful and hits a lot of great points.
Antti Haavikko
Apr 22nd · 17:54 UTC
I meant that you could keep the button orders the same but just switch the colors of the icons to mach the xbox buttons so that triangle would be yellow, circle red, x green and square blue. So the button presses would be the same no matter which controller, shape would match ps and color xbox.

That way there wouldn't be a need to detect the controller at all. Though I'm sure there is a way to do it in Godot. I've only recently changed to Godot from Unity but at least there (and in raw JavaScript) you can get the name of the controller and detect it that way.
Jacky San
Apr 22nd · 19:56 UTC
Very nice proposition ! :clap:
dk5000p
Apr 23rd · 00:17 UTC
Great art and humor. Not much of a rhythm game person, so not exactly for me, but good entry.
Bumble
Apr 23rd · 19:34 UTC
This is a very unique rhythm game with how the buttons are not controlling the lane you are hitting but the color! The way it is set up does make it somewhat easy to just clear every color one after another, but this does not change, that this is definitely one of my favorite entries!
The way you made the theme fit by adding the different wave sounds is also a very nice touch!
Railnof
Apr 24th · 13:28 UTC
Really polished and visually stunning. But i quit during the tutorial, even with the easy difficulty. The game was too skill demanding for me, i need a flatter difficulty curve on rythmn games to appreciate them.
IRKAR
Apr 25th · 08:22 UTC
Cool animations but don`t recognize how to hold two line in one time. Good job!
VenomousMouse
Apr 27th · 10:39 UTC
Very nice rhythm game. I like the visuals, very cool characters, and sounds. Great job.
digital bacon
Apr 29th · 12:33 UTC
Cool little game. I don't usually enjoy rhythm games, but this one held my interest. Love the art style!

Excellent work -- well done!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 30th · 14:45 UTC
@railnof Thanks for playing and giving it a shot! If you were having trouble with timing not syncing up properly, and you were using the web-version, try downloading one of the desktop versions and see if that's easier!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 30th · 14:47 UTC
@irkar Thanks for playing! Holding two at once is a little confusing, you basically want to press each note once it would cross the bottom bar above the player. So if two notes are at the same time in the same lane, you press both buttons at once. Hope this helps!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 30th · 14:47 UTC
@digital-bacon Thanks so much for the kind words!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 30th · 14:48 UTC
@venomousmouse Thanks for playing!
Thomas Gelman
Apr 30th · 14:50 UTC
@bumble Thanks so much for the kind words! Yeah the idea came from audio signals / waveforms, which led us to create this rhythm game hah.