Portugues
Search of Sounds
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About the game
Somewhere in this stretch of ocean there are nine research stations, each built on an island inside a sector of strange electromagnetic fluctuations. Their cores overload from time to time, and when that happens the station sends out a distress signal. You are the one with the boat.
Search of Sounds is played as much with the ears as with the eyes. There is no arrow pointing to the island in trouble: the distress call is a sound, and it gets louder as the bow of your boat turns towards its source. Sweep around, find the direction where the signal is strongest and sail that way across the open water until an island comes into view. Anchor next to it, and if it is the right one, the work begins.
Stabilising a core is a memory game. The station plays a short melody made of three notes, and you answer it note for note with the arrow keys. Each time you get it right the melody grows by one note; a mistake makes the station play it again from the start. Once a core is stable the next signal goes out, and the melodies grow longer from island to island until all nine stations are calm.
Vitalii Liapin made Search of Sounds for js13kGames 2017, whose theme was "Lost". The islands, the waves, the boat and the music are all generated by the code.
Playing it here
Click Play, read the short briefing and press A. The title screen offers a New Game and a graphics setting (High, Mid or Low; restart the game after changing it). Headphones or speakers make a big difference, since finding the stations depends on hearing which way the signal is coming from. The game was made for a fixed 640 x 480 window, which this page scales to fit. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Key | At sea | At a station |
|---|---|---|
| ↑ | sail forward | note 2 |
| ← / → | turn the boat | notes 1 and 3 |
| A | anchor at an island, confirm | give up and sail on |
A few things worth knowing
Stop and listen. Turning slowly on the spot and noticing where the signal peaks is quicker than sailing around at random.
The wrong island tells you so. If you anchor at a quiet island, the game says the signal comes from somewhere else; set sail again and keep listening.
Say the notes in your head. Naming them left, up, right as the station plays them makes the longer melodies much easier to repeat.
Credits and licence
Search of Sounds was created by Vitalii Liapin. The music is synthesised by Sonant-X, by Nicolas Vanhoren, Marcus Geelnard and Jake Taylor (zlib licence). The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3; the source code of this build and the licence texts are linked from this page.