Cute little game, like the overall concept and love the platform destruction.
One slight bug I found was that if you fail the first checkpoint, it dissapears and you have to quit the game and restart it.

Great looking game with fantastic music. Few bugs around detecting when I was by a tree or checkpoint. Found some of the platforming to be a pain when the platforms were very close together. Otherwise a great game.

It's a bit buggy, had to restart the game a few times.
Other than that a very good one!

great job!

This was visually stunning and the audio was really good as well! The platforming was a little floaty and hard to control, but it was manageable. Overall, you did a really great job. Looking forward to the timelapse!

I love the graphics, that viking looks amazing well done. My widescreen monitor messed up the UI which was a shame, but it works really well and looks beautiful. Good job

Awesome game!! I think you did a splendid job here. I really hate those spikes, hahaha. At the end of the game I can't click on OK button, but it worth to spend my time trying your game. Thank you a lot!

Congratulations!!

I've seen your game on youtube at first. It bring me here, so I've tried to play it. It's amazing! Moreover, you've manager to do all the work by yourself! Great job. Probably best Compo I've seen so far.

Super nice graphics and animation!!! I love the animation of the character like the wood cutting. The clouds and lightning were also really nice. I found the jumping a bit hard though. The character needs to speed up before jumping and I found that a bit unpractical since there is almost no space to do that.

Hey guys, thanks for your comments and feedback so far!
@shadowblaze - I have uploaded a fixed version that should work on ultrawide monitors too.
@spigaru - I have uploaded a fixed version now that allows you to click the OK button.
@jeroenpx - thanks for the feedback on input, I will make it more direct in a future version. Depending on the popularity of this game I will consider making it into a bigger release with more levels, more content, and I will make the input more "snappy".

@imphenzia Great! Thank you!

Really nice looking game. I found the controls a little unresponsive when chopping down trees, I was getting caught by the lightning before I could chop down the tree some trees where fine others not.

Amazing game, maybe slow the storm down a little bit as I found you getting killed by it quite alot. Other than that, amazing game!!!

The low-poly art style looks great, and the lightning is a nice touch. Nice entry

Fuck you Thor and fuck your thunderbolts as well. Awesome entry! 5/5 audio!

Level design could have been better, clouds advanced too fast and some platforms were badly placed. But the concept is cool, and the art is outstanding, as well as the animations, seriously that was really well done.

I liked the game, but I'm too bad at platformers to get past the second level

Thanks for including a web version. Definitely makes players' lives easier. Great game, too. A cohesive package.

Love that you added a web version :D. The art and animations is spectacular. Honestly this is such a solid looking game. However, the mechanics weren't as solid. I found myself falling off the edge a bunch, and restarting. Clever use of the theme, though! And I liked the lightning encouraging urgency!

Looks great and music/audio is very good, however I can't get past the very first screen :/
Once I chop a tree that is either closer or farther on the depth axis, the character seems to not come back on its original depth position and cannot chop trees on the other side (if I cut a tree that is closer to the camera, I can never chop trees farther from the camera, and vice versa).
Maybe you should force back the character on its original position, or never move him on this axis ?
I would love to test again if you manage to fix this, it looks like a nice game ;)

@legulysse I have only encountered that bug two times and I know what you mean. I'm not sure what causes it yet, I can see that he is sliding depthwise and you can't chop a tree as you say but I already force depth position but there must be a race condition between two states. Do you get this every single time?? I am wondering if we can pinpoint what is causing it =) Thanks for reporting!

This is one of the most impressive games I've seen submitted to compos. The sounds, the effects, the setting, it's so very atmospheric. And it also gets quite challenging at times.


Some of the jumping was finicky, though. It's very easy to die in specific spots because the jumpings can get very tricky, but that actually felt so good with the setting of the game. As in, the rain, clouds and thunder did make it feel like an urgency. Stopping to chop wood only added to it.

There's a lot of greatness to be found in Blót. [My team](discord.whalesandgames.com) are going to love it when they get a chance to play it. Keep up the good work, and, again, excellent compo entry! :whale:

@imphenzia yes I tried at least ten times, with all the builds you provided, and got the bug every time^^
Sorry to be that guy :D
Maybe increasing the chopping range on the depth axis could do the trick ?

The game is very fun to play, I love your low-poly art work very much, also the audio part is good too.
I met some bugs in the Web version, like sometime I cannot unlock the next lv. You can check the screen shot I uploaded below.
But in the game jam, people lacks of time to test, so it wont effect my rate. Good job overall, it can be a nice post-jam game, keep working on it!


@legulysse Thanks for the update. I can't seem to reproduce the issue. I have created a build that forces the z axis back "even more" to 0 in this build: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0egyl46mvykxt5c/BlotD1.zip?dl=0 if you want to try. I would love to find the bug so I can fix it - do you have any screencapturing software so I can see how/when it happens? I understand if you don't have time for that of course :)

@sanyingli - thanks, glad you like it! I wonder if that is the same bug... does he sweep a bit back and forth when you are standing at the rune stone or is he just standing perfectly still and nothing happens?

@moski - thanks for the kind comments! I have joined the discord but I am the world's most inactive discord user I think so I miss notifications :) Hope your team likes it too!

I'm rather fond of the concept, destroying the platforms is a nice touch. The sort of scale model graphics are pretty good! I think the weakest part of this game are the controls, it feels slow and some jumps rely too much on the character's upward inertia, which feels weird. Otherwise good job :)

Also I got a bug where I couldn't get past a level even though I had the resources? Apparently others have reported it already...

@lucien-catonnet Thanks. I tried to update to more direct controls but that feels weird to me now, probably because I am used to the springy one during development =) I will probably try to find a nice balance. That bug is a rail pain - not sure how to reproduce it. Any circumstances to think of? Looks like end of level two, did it occur all the time? Had you died by lightning or something like that before? If you don't remember, I totally understand =) =)

@imphenzia Yes I played through the first level, then died, then clicked "continue" and then this happened :/ Also on my first try of the second level after the continue, I couldn't get the hay resource (or is it cloth?), but afterwards I could.

I may have found and rectified that bug now both in the WebGL and CompoVersion download. I managed to reproduce the problem if I jumped *right* after I had finished chopping down a tree but after this fix I couldn't reproduce the issue again so hopefully it's fixed now =)

<3

@imphenzia I tried the BlotD1.zip you provided and the bug is fixed for me, I can now play the game, thanks o/
As said earlier, graphics, audio and music are very good !
I like the mood.

The controls feel very uncomfortable though. Having the main keys as ctrl and space means using the little finger a lot, and it's almost painful after some time. I would prefer something like wasd/space/e to play with only one hand, or use two nearby keys.

Also, I can't manage to get past the phase with three consecutive spikes with holes in-between. The air control feels too imprecise and slippery to be able to jump on the edge of the spikes, and I keep getting killed trying to figure out where the hitbox of the spike is applied :/
(I'm not an excellent platformer player though).

Nice job anyway o/

This is one of the most wonderful games I have seen on the event!!!! :smiley: :scream:

The gameplay, artwork, sound effects and music are really nice! :smiley:

The idea is pretty cool, I like it!

I'm sure, one of the best! :v:

Nice graphics and sound make this a cohesive package, but I wasn't too excited about the gameplay. Besides making the feel of the controls better you could add more alternative paths and choices the player can make. It could also be nice if the lightning would at first only remove few of the platforms to make areas harder and only then clear them away completely.

Thanks for rating my game @imphenzia so I thought that I would return the favor.

Great low poly graphics and art style. The music was very good and the atmosphere of the game was awesome. Nice to see a 3D style in a "2D" platform game.

Now to the parts where I think you can improve. The jumping part was a bit frustrating at times due to the level design. Maybe in the future offer double jump and/or wall jump to create a bit more variation.
The "hitbox" of the trees could be increased a bit so you can hit the ctrl button a bit further way.

But all in all an awesome game made during such a short period of time. Well done!

For everything I didn't like about this game, there were many things I loved. The collision was meh, but the art was amazing! The platformer controller was a little wonky, but the animations and sound were on point. Honestly, the biggest problem I have with this game was the controls. What if you made jump the up arrow and harvest the space key? That would make the whole control scheme easier on the hands. But I did get used to the controls after a while, and when I finished the game, I really felt accomplished. The difficulty is pretty well managed, and the overall game was great. Nice work!

Wow, amazing entry!! can't believe this is from a compo.

This game is pretty hard! The controls are somewhat floaty, so some jumps were hard to make.
Well done for a compo, though! The idea is stressfull, but interesting.

PS. The game crashed once for me. I think it was because i was mashing CTRL and other buttons in the web browser.

Impressive! Thanks for sharing the timelapse!

Nice entry!
Game design is balanced, Low-Poly art is great, music is exactly what it needs.
P.S. Additional thanks for your time-lapses, very inspirational :thumbsup:

I like the idea behind your game but I was not able to achieve the second sacrifice because sometimes the trees would not have let me chop them, sometimey the hay was uncollectable and the controls are delayed by about 0.5 seconds for me which makes it hard to survive the platforms...

Anyways - rating the idea and the other stufgf you got a quite cool rating.

If you want to see what I encountered, watch the end of my VOD (LD Stream 2) on twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/firesplashtv) Looking forward to hearing back.

Thanks for your feedback everyone!

@hectigo @flashviper @sandpile I didn't reset the "gravity" and "spring" settings for the control inputs so they ramp up and down as you go left and right unfortunately. This means that there is a slight delay. I forgot about that during development because I got so used to the controls that I didn't find it to be an issue while testing, but I can definitely see what you mean and will fix in the post compo version that I'm working on now =)

Also happy to hear you find the timelapses fun/useful, I will keep making those.

@firesplash-entertainment Thanks for streaming the game! The bug that you encontered (inability to chop wood at certain times) is fixed in the WebGL and the "Compo"-version of the windows download - I noticed that you downloaded the one from the original release. Oddly enough I didn't encounter the bug often myself but I see that you got it very frequently, so sorry about that. Also, I see the level design (tricky jumps) and the slow key response affected the game. I am fixing this is a new version to gradually ramp up trick level difficulty.

Thanks a lot again everyone!

@imphenzia Just mention me when you changed the level :) Will try it again then. Thanks for your reply.

For some reason this game is inspiring to play. Nice entry!

I had seen your videos on YouTube and kind of assumed I had then played the game, so when I looked at this page I was surprised to see I didn't rate it yet. Then it dawned on me. :laughing: Mistake corrected.

I made it to the three traps in a row without land tiles in between them, and could not make it across that one. I got to the third trap a few times, but always died there. The sweet spot for landing just is a little too small for me. (I did just manage to get over that trap just now, after typing the next paragraph, but fell to my death trying to get off of it.)

The art is very solid, and you have a pretty recognizable signature. I first found your games two Ludum Dares ago, and I imagine I'd be able to pick future entries out of a line-up. The weather effects are solid too. The music is very atmospheric, but I do wish there were sfx for footsteps and jumps. (Or if there were, I couldn't hear them over the music.)

A solid entry, I just wish I was better at these jumps! :smile:

@flaterectomy - thanks for the feedback, much appreciated! It's funny you should mention the lineup because I will probably be able to say the same for your signature as I remember both the rally and the toilet cleaning games from past Ludum Dares when I saw you guys had made them too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSObiXrNTco

@jacklehamster - thanks for the video!

I see one bug that is causing some problems for people, and that is that when you run against a platform and jump, it reduces your jump height. The reason for this is a capsule collider that tucks in a little bit under the platform. I am fixing this in the future version but it will still be an issue in the speedrun version so just avoid jumping when you are right next to a platform and at least don't run into it while you jump =)

The visuals are lovely and the main track is great, though I'm not sure it fits the gameplay due to the following point. I have issues with the game - the game rushes you, but you have to stop and wait for the choppinch animation to finish, which gets tedious pretty quick. If there was the the ability to mash a button to chop faster, then there would be some player agency, but right now it's just waiting for the nice chopping animation to finish and it feels like the game would be better off without it.
The other thing is the platforming - some of the jumps are kinda wonky (e.g. the bug mentioned by yourself in the post above) and the trap colliders feel unfair.

That all being said, the entry is impressive, especially for a compo entry. Sorry for being so nitpicky...

The game looks great, especially for a compo game ! Sometimes the lighting striked critical part of the level so i was stuck on my platform since i couldn't jump high enoug. Good job anyway !

@secretpocketcat thanks for the feedback! The manual chopping is a cool idea, it could reward you by timing the chops and it would, like you said, keep the player occupied at all times. I will consider that in the next release :) yep, i understand that the jumping can be improved. I am working on faster acceleration left/right but that actually makes the precise distance jumping harder since it is more difficult to micro adjust. Will see where I end up! Thanks again.

":thumbsup: The graphics looked very nice, and I really liked the clouds and lightning chasing the player. The music was dramatic, and the sound effects were well produced.

:point_right: At first I tried the WebGL version, but it ran painfully slow, so I switched to the downloaded version. I found the head bumping jumps troublesome, but I'm not sure there would have been too much timing testing in the early jumps without them. I eventually gave up on the spike hop section, after dying to the first skip a couple dozen times (jumping out of the world shows the reset dialog much faster than getting impaled :frowning2:). I would have liked to see the end, but I didn't have the patience.

:star: Overall good job, and thank you for making this."

Wow, this was a compo game!? That's incredible!

It took me 9:57 so I'm very far from speed running it :)

I loved the graphics, the animations, and the awesome ragdoll physics when you die! The game was very challenging in a good way, and had a lot of fun playing through it.

I have a few nitpicks, though I feel funny mentioning them given the time constraints - what you've got is certainly incredible. Anyway, just for completeness, my nits:

1) It sometimes takes a long time after you die and the ragdoll physics start and until you get the "try again" button, which gets a bit annoying especially in the harder sections when you have to try a bunch of times.
2) The first "level" started with a jump that was very challenging for me (getting from the bottom part that has the crop back to the main path on the upper path). I'm not 100% sure if it was the first or second levels, but it felt a bit too early in the game for such a big challenge.
3) The 3 spikes that go up and down near the end were super difficult for me. I almost gave up - it took me a while to figure out you don't die if you bump them from the side and then I used that (basically bumping each spike from the left side, waiting for it to go down, and then jumping over it and bumping it from the right). However, before I found that strategy, I died around 20 times on the first spike and was very close to giving up. I'm not entirely sure how to fix it but the platforming on that section didn't feel very intuitive to me.
4) I think animation for cutting wood/crop should have been much faster. Especially near the end when the actual platforming gets really challenging, and you have to reply sections many times, waiting each time for the wood to be cut gets a bit old.

Anyway, all of the above didn't detract much from my gameplay experience, it was still a really awesome game, definitely one of the best compo entries I've played! Thank you for making this fun game!

P.S after writing the above review I wanted to check out your previous games and then I figured out who you are. Your time lapse video for making Robby & Coppy is what originally inspired me to join Ludum Dare, so thank you for that as well!

I understand why itch.io recommend your game. Your entry is well polished so it serve some popularity. And it's deserved.

@matank Thanks for the indepth feedback. When I release a post-LD version of the game in January I will make better level progression so you ease in to the more difficult sections. I understand that the three spikes are challenging, it requires quite some careful adjustments and that should be coming in later levels. I am also considering to do manual chopping so you have to time the hits to keep yourself occupied without waiting periods.

I'm also glad that you found the Robby & Coppy timelapse inspirational enough to get you started with Ludum Dare - that makes me really happy! I hope you are enjoying the LD-experience =)

@acaral - Thanks =) I just checked itch.io and I couldn't see it being featured, maybe it was a random feature or something??

very moody game. some of the jumps were quite challenging.

The shading looks great! The graphics reminded me a lot of clay motion

i can't rate your game because i can't control the character : keyboard doesn't work here :-( i'm running it on Google Chrome if it can help.

Nice game! I as not able to pass through that part with the 3 pikes, maybe I'm not good enough :P. I do find the pacing of the game a bit too slow for speedrunning though. I'd also like to have some kind of indicator (like a progress bar) so you know how long it will take to harvest things. Overall a really cool and fun entry!

PS: There is actually another game in this jam with the same title, in case you did not know:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/blot

@king-kujito - thanks, yes, I can see that resemblance too! @mgsx - not sure whay that would be, hmm, haven't had any other reports of that or managed to reproduce it - I use Chrome too.
@mateusboga - thanks - yes, it's a bit tricky and I am increasing gravity and speed a bit to make it a bit faster. I came across the duplicate named entry a few days after I submitted, but I see my URL is blot-1 so the other game launched using that name faster but I think that duplicate names may be common for themed games =)

The graphics in this game are incredible, especially for 48 hours!

Good game. Nice job! I really like the graphics and the idea and gameplay are great

Pretty decent game! I got stuck on the 3 spikey pillar jumping challenge and I gotta admit I rage quit the game. I just kept sliding off the edges of the platforms into the abyss or into the spikes even if I landed on the platform. The wait between retrying and having to move my hand over to my mouse to click the continue button was what did it for me. If you do a V2, maybe try taking a note from super meat boy and make re-trying much quicker.

Even with that said though, the game is actually super polished. The controls were smooth, and the animations and graphics were very clean. Well done on that.

Overall, the game was great. And the fact that you've included a whole speedrun meta game is really neat! I think that's a clever way to add more to the game for people that want more of a challenge. Very creative.