Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Blåkulla
By xand, simon-rahnasto, Belle and DanielD
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 25 | 4.32 | 43 | |
| Fun | 71 | 4.13 | 43 | |
| Innovation | 66 | 4.08 | 43 | |
| Theme | 19 | 4.54 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 30 | 4.61 | 43 | |
| Audio | 103 | 4.06 | 43 | |
| Humor | 590 | 3.00 | 42 | |
| Mood | 73 | 4.23 | 43 |
Good graphics and audio, but from the get go I had issues. Fullscreen and non-fullscreen both are completely broken, cutting off the bottom of the window which makes playing really annoying. Certain spells very very difficult to cast, but that is probably on me more than the game.
A really beautiful game with interesting summoning mechanics, I'm greatly impressed by the drawing system (no idea how you managed to code it). It's fun how you learn to draw some spells by memory and can even play without checking the cards all the time.
@6knowledge Sorry to hear that you had issues. The game requires a 1080p display. If your monitor supports that and you still have issues makes sure that you have scaling on apps set to 100% (Windows defaults to higher on laptops for whatever reason). You find this setting in "display settings" I have added this info to the description, thank you! 8fae805afd1add1f3da7462d8389ef4e.png
One of the best games this jam. The background artwork is stunning (I love the rain), the character designs are great, the card artwork, enemy designs, ah!
The ONLY complaint is sometimes I make the shape that I believe to spawn something, and it doesn't spawn it. I have no idea how difficult it is on the backend to make a game like this even work, needing to parse out my jank scribbles as a specific glyph sounds incredibly difficult, though if it doesn't spawn due to cooldown, it should absolutely make a little "Cooldown!" message over my dude's head. Then perhaps if the drawing was too jank, a "?" over my guy. The spells sometimes not working is my only criticism, and I can't say it's that harsh of one considering how difficult of a system that must be to implement. Bravo for making it work!
Here's my recording for extra feedback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD2C3fAtA8w
Great game, large variety of skills, awesome graphics and sounds! I'm so bad at drawing but enjoyed playing this game for more than 15 minutes :smile:
love the art but the character has to much hp its a little op of you ask me (played for 15min) love the game tho
Oh man... I didn't notice how 20 minutes flew by after launching the game. Great graphics, idea, and sound!
I like the music a lot. It goes perfectly with the ambient. Also art is very well made. The mechanic of making shapes to cast spells is really fun!
I'm amazed of the polish in this game. Definitely the best game feel I've seen in this LD. Love the art and smoothness of the gameplay. Solid submission!
This is my favorite game so far. Everything works perfectly and it's very well balanced. Loved the music and the graphics too. You guys made an awesome entry. Congrats!
It's me again!
Wow, I've not rated many games, and I always expect good things from Simon's team's games, but this has been the best one I've played so far. It's a totally complete experience with an insane amount of content in it! The UI polish is nuts. The card flip-flpping, the loads of spells, enemy variety, the cutscene. The little characters waxing philosophical. I lvoed the theming. Took me a while to realise that the cards were just reminders, and I could actually draw at any time, but once I did, I quickly found my favourites to use (the flame in the cloud was my MVP! Partly because it was one of the few I could always remember lol). Honestly my suggestion more would have been to cut down the number of spells a little, and make it a little more of a decision, trying to choose which spells to cast. But there was also kind of a chaotic joy in just panicking at the end and spamming squiggles, and happily getting some spells I'd forgotten about working.
5/5 from me, well done all involved. Quality entry.
Really well made game. The art and sound were really good. Summoning by drawing worked great. Way to go!
Really great game, it took me a while to remember how to summon helpers. Could be a little bit harder, but I had a lot of fun playing it.
Wow, it's an amazing game! The gameplay, the art style, the drawing system, all is made with the high quality.
I had problems with casting specific spells, but it's a minor issue as you choose your current deck yourself.
That was just pure quality, perfect use of the theme, and a fun result that is polished beyond what I expected. Most certainly one of the best games in the jam.
The boss fight was great, and also just the enemies in general.
The art is amazing quite frankly, especially the enemies they're fantastic.
The audio is good, especially considering the time frame.
And the game was enjoyable throughout my whole play time.
Good job to all who worked on the game, you really made a gem from the theme.
Actualy realy good game it took me some time to relaize that i can sumon even the card witch i haent drawned right now but otherwise the game is realy good.
Lovely graphics, pro presentation, even the scene direction is cool. The enemy art is definitely memorable and the music is nice. I really like the summoning of spells using signs with the mouse and more games need to do that. I think though that you need a bit of balancing because the fire spell is op :D All in all, huge congrats!
What a blast! Artstyle is very nice & coherent. impressive work!
5/5 game here! Wish I'd had more time to play this onstream. Def going back and stomping that creepy stranger-danger hooded blue character. Loved every single aspect of this game, great job team! <3
So smooth, i enjoyed it! Art is really great
It's an interesting concept, good job!
I really liked this game, especially the drawing mechanic. The visuals are great and all is very well polished, congrats :clap:
An incredible game! I really liked the graphics, everything was very well animated and vivid. I also liked the sound, very immersive and responsive. The gameplay is extremely good too. The drawing mechanic to summon creatures is very creative. You guys did a good job here.
Congratulations!
Fun and challenging gameplay, the drawing and scroll mechanic was so satisfying to do. Graphic and themes are immaculate. Well done!! would love to see this game flourish
graphic and animation is really dynamic, gameplay at first is really cool. A little problem is that the writing animation is a bit slow after first seen, and I have to check it multiple times, actually all the time, cause it's hard to simply remenber all the graphs to draw.
Very fun game, cool art style, a lot of game mechanics to choose from. Overall good job!
Probably my favourite game that I've played from this jam. Very fun mood and story and a very good core mechanic to try and master. Loved it
Great game as always! The symbol drawing and detecting is done really well, and it's cool that you have so many. The scrolling through the cards is quite sensitive. It would have been nice if I was able to press a number to get a set (e.g. press 2 for cards 4 to 6). I also felt like I was never really in danger, though I get you don't want to make it too hard, considering it's a game-jam game. The character design is cool, and so is the overall vibe, though I didn't understand the story completely. It's also cool that you have a boss fight! Graphics and music are amazing, but what else to expect from you guys? A job well done once again!
Wow, what a wonderful game! Loved every bit of it, from the wonderful menu screen and the otherworldly story up to the boss fight. The environment, animations and effects are breathtaking. And it's not only a feast for eyes, but for ears also!
I was a bit confused about the card mechanic first, but it actually works incredibly well. Slowing down the time while looking at cards is a nice touch. It also happened, that I accidentally cast spells I didn't even know yet, which was super fun. Reminded me of an old game called Black & White from Peter Molyneux, where you also were able to cast spells that way, but in my impression your implementation actually worked better :thumbsup:
I also think, the balance is great. I'm sure you could make your game much more difficult, like adding more spawn areas and monsters, but being able to run over enemies like this feels good.
The writing is gorgeous, too. The ending dialog is a true gem.
Love it! Good job and thanks for the game!
Great game, I had a lot of fun. I hope you can sort out the scaling issues at some point (I was using 125% scale until I noticed that things were cut off).
Also, you should put the Ludum Dare link on itch.io too, makes it easier to find the game from there. It was easier searching for games on itch and I remembered the name from a stream so I used that to look it up, but couldn't find the Ludum page right away.
Wow that was fun! Such a well polished game. I love everything, the game mechanics, smooth controls, amazing art style and great music! The only feedback I can think off would be: - The game feels a bit too easy. I never was close to dying. - While moving mouse around to cast spells quite few time I mouse over cards at the bottom, which was a bit annoying. Maybe if cards were on the side of the screen. - I do not feel like there are consequences (or can't just find them) of just changing cards. Maybe if they had limited number of uses or something? - I wish player had some influence over cards they are getting, like choosing between weapon-cards and summoning-card.
One more time great game!
Great visuals, wonderful soundtrack that works well with the game and very impressive summoning system. Great sounds, also! It's difficult to think of a better way to embrace the theme than creating custom casting patterns for each summoned creature. Fantastic work!
The game looks absolutely incredible! Whilst I was playing I didn’t really get to appreciate all the animations of the enemies + my summons, they all look great! That being said, I feel like the game had a lot form over function, where it looked snazzy, but was unnecessarily complicated to use. The way the cards slide across the screen looks epic, and the way it draws out the spell is super slick, buuuuut you could’ve just shown a list of all the symbols + their current charge and then you would always know what spells are ready and how to draw them, no more steps needed! Little things like scrolling through the deck added a lot of mental load, and rewatching I see that I didn’t grasp the difference between a blue and red spell, despite you clearly spelling it out many times. Also with so many spells, I could never recall all the spells, which was made harder by the fact you could only see spells when hovered over them + scrolled to the right spot. All that being said, I still really loved the game, and just hope this feedback is helpful! :heart:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2126502001
The word "beautiful" came to mind a lot. Not only the visual side; the "story" touched me on a deeper level - this is the type of writing I strive to be able to do one day, and very close to the vibe I'd like my protagonist to have towards the antagonist.
The idea behind the game is interesting, although I never gotten to really know what summon to use when during two playthroughs. I can't even start to imagine how difficult the part where the game decodes a scribble into an intent, and that's something you get extra points for innovation.
I'll sum it up as always:
Great job, as always! :smile:
Astonishing polished game!
I liked the dark theme and story carried on by small chats. Characters and everything was very well drawn and in a unique art style. Music was great bringing the mood and sounds also fit the game.
About gameplay, I liked how many possibilities there were to summon different stuff and how you knew quite easily from the start what you had to do... But it wasn't always clear when I failed a summon, was it because it was in the cooldown or because it didn't recognize my drawing. I think most of the time I couldn't get it right so it was a maybe a bit too picky on what to accept.
On the other hand, it must be hard to code that kind of gesture recognition, many games on this ludum seems to have it though, but I have no idea how I would go about making such a system. Maybe there are some ready widgets for that in certain engines. Anyway, it's a cool mechanic and I liked that the game slowed down for the time of summoning, as otherwise it would have been way too unforgiving.
Otherwise than the pickiness and lack of response when summoning on cooldown, I have no complaints of the game. Well, maybe the enemies could have had weaknesses for certain attacks, or if they had I couldn't tell but I guess that fell out of the scope for you.
Awesome experience for a jam game, although that's what I could already expect of you :sunglasses:
Really love the graphics as always, but this time Belle really outdid herself. The cards are especially beautiful and everything fits together really well. I was also impressed by how well the game recognizes the shapes you draw and how it starts becoming second nature after playing for a while. Good idea for a mechanic and really fits well with the theme of summoning. The amount of effort and polish that has gone into this game are very obvious and you deserve all the praise you are getting. Super well done!
Wow, that was really fun! Even with a boss fight in the end ^^
**Difficulty** Not too hard (good for me lol) but maybe in the future there could be different difficulty levels, this would be easy and then there will be harder ones. I like how time slowed down a bit while drawing. But on topic of drawing...
**Mechanic** I loved the idea, and it made the game super fun, playing around with drawing shapes to summon elemental creatures! However... I failed to find a pattern in these.
- First of all, sometimes I couldn't summon anything at all. I thought ok, maybe if I have a summon of that type already, I can't call them again. But then, I would have no summons left at all, but no shapes seem to work. And it's not the accuracy of my drawing - because much more ambiguous shapes have worked well before.
**Types**.
- *Circle*. The only constant, I think, was the circle - but sometimes it summoned fires I couldn't control, and sometime it would give me a fire cloud summon that fired fireballs at my command and was the most OP summon in the game.
fire cloud.jpg
- *Half-moon*. I tried it (as I was drawing inspiration from the card) and summoned 3 rock(?) dudes. They looked like rock clouds (BUT **not** rock cloud I will attach below, these were sand-coloured, came in threes, and were ON the ground!) and I think they attacked automatically. However, I could only repeat that once. After that, half moon shape either didn't work at all, or summoned something I would expect, say, from a circle (fire cloud).
halfmoon.jpg
Regular rock cloud:
rock cloud.jpg
- *Wave*. Mostly it gave me rainclouds that fire icicles, or porings (I mean, like slimes?) made of water. Sometimes it would be something different, though. I recall that regular rock summons also came from waves. I found no difference between smooth wave and sharp-edged one. On this screenshot, both the cloud and rock were summoned from the same shape.
waveshape.jpg
TLDR: I have no idea in the end, which shapes should do what. (Also just realized from description I can switch cards, lol I didn't do that in the game, drew all the inspo from one xD)
**Technical** Game opened in a full screen, but I tried clicking "enter full screen" and that actually made it look very cropped, and when I went to "credits" page, I had to close the game and open again because "return" button was off the screen:
offscreen.jpg
Then, I checked my settings and switched resolution to 100% as suggested. After that, full screen option just doesn't change anything. So, I am not sure what this option is for, as there is no windowed version anyway ^^'
**Overall**
Fun mechanic, *gorgeous* visuals (especially background, but in general - very pretty!), cute summons, very inventive, honestly no complaints other than shapes results being confusing and shapes not working sometimes! (and my desktop becoming a mess after switching to 100% and back to 125% ;_;) Story was obscure but it worked well. Completed! <3
night.jpg