Blåkulla by Simon Rahnasto

The specific, earthy smell of summer rain never ceases here, where the morning dew never seems to let the day in.
Beautiful at first, with light breaking through the trees to illuminate the mossy forest floor, until you realize there are no birds singing on its branches.
Deep within Blåkulla you summon elements to your aid by reading and drawing tarot cards.

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| LMB - Shoot with a summoned spirit *|
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| *RMB - Hold to draw symbols and cast summons *|
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| *Scroll - To flip through your tarot cards *|
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| WASD - Move *|
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Change log:
- Fixed bug causing drawing to be harder with high framerate.
Currently only supports a resolution of 1920 x 1080
If your monitor is 1080p, but you can't see the entire game make sure you don't have a higher than 100% scaling in display settings 
| Link | https://windmillgames.itch.io/blakulla |
| Link | https://windmillgames.itch.io/blakulla |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blakulla |
Ratings
| Overall | 25th | 4.329⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 71th | 4.134⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 66th | 4.085⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 19th | 4.549⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 30th | 4.61⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 103th | 4.061⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 590th | 3⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 73th | 4.232⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 79🗨️ |
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
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.
I had problems with casting specific spells, but it's a minor issue as you choose your current deck yourself.
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.
Congratulations!
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!
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.
- 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!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2126502001
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:
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:
**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.

- *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).

Regular rock cloud:

- *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.

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:

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
