Shelter from the Blight by Yiraa

The world above is crumbling.
A relentless storm of corruption rains down from the sky, threatening to consume everything in its path. To survive, you must descend into the depths below, harvesting new resources and building new structures.
But beware, the corruption spreads quickly, and once it consumes a level, the ground is lost to the void. Only by digging deeper can you hope to uncover the secrets of the earth and escape the storm's advance.
The journey begins here... in the shadow of corruption.!
⚠️ Important Note
The embedded web version is limited: the screen is cramped, and the UI may appear oversized.
For the best experience, please download the game or play the web version in fullscreen on itch.io.
Keybindings
- Arrow Keys (UP/DOWN): Move between depths
- Right-click and drag or WASD: Move the map
Links
- itch.io: Shelter from the Blight
Ratings
| Given | 11🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
The UI seems a bit too cramped in the web build on my 1080p monitor. When I click on stuff I only get "cannot place this here" messages and they overlap with the UI and I cannot click on items in the lower menu.
An interesting take on an idle game where you cannot be idle due to time pressure. Cool!
I would also prefer if building placement was more strategic: maybe there could be adjacency bonuses or distance to main building could matter in some way.
The trees and farms look great!
And like a rogue like, you need to understand that you need amass more ressources than needed because they are needed down below (die/retry)
@woona adjacency bonuses were planeed but we didn't got the time to add them :( it's only in a txt file for the moment
However, the gameplay is a bit slow. If you sped it up by ~30% it probably wouldn't impact decision making at all, but it would decrease to down time. It's also really easy to get softlocked between layers if you don't have enough wood to place new wood harvesting buildings before the previous layer gets corrupted. Not sure if that's by design or not, or maybe I'm just bad at the game :sweat_smile:
Also for some reason it's very hard to click on the wood building button in the WebGL build, half of my clicks didn't register. The other two buildings worked fine.
I will say I was a bit confused at the beginning as to what buildings did and where they were allowed to be placed - it'd be nice to highlight the permitted tiles, or at least make the placement indicator less transparent.
That being said, this was a really ambitious title and I'm very impressed by what you guys accomplished, nice job!
it's a little bit difficult for managing the 2nd layer goods (as they are very scarce) and you basically have to restart the game if the stone areas are not enough (had one run with 3 stones)
I got through the game with 3 diamond diggers, 480 wood and 70 stones left, and 1000+ iron and 1000+ diamons
so, if I wasn't too greedy with the iron phase, I would have accomplished 5 diamond diggers
very interesting game, but it needs some more balancing - well done!
I do think that the linearity of the resources and the fact 99% corruption seems to be just as good as 0% was problematic. The objectively correct way to play was simply to place every possible sawmill followed by every possible farm and then enough drills to get to the next area.
It's a very nice concept. Interesting combination of the theme and strategic managing city builder.
It's cool that you can switch between heights/levels, but the previous one seems useless? I lacked wood to build new structures and still could not build more lumber producing ones in the higher town.
It's a very great jam game and it makes me thing about a whole game like that, it's scalable and inspiring.
This game looks awesome and control between levels was intuitive. The economy system was a bit gotcha, was thinking that could it be better if you could still gather the early game resources further down, but with reduced effectivity, or so that they would reappear at some lower level, but not perhaps each.
Was a fun experience!
As people mentioned above: The game could be faster and the building placement could be more strategic (for example buffs if you place it in a certain order). It would be nice if I could place the same building type multiple times, so I don't have to click on the build button again.
Here are some things I really liked about the game:
+ layer system was cool! Switching between layers looked good and the theme was used in a creative way.
+ new sprites on each layer was a nice touch
+ sound effects when placing a building
+ graphics looked good, I like the art style
Cool little game. Congrats for finishing it. :)
It wasn't clear from the first time how the buildings interacted with each other (how much food does one digger need? Do they need to be placed next to each other?), but through trial and error it worked out intuitively.
In the process, it was very surprising that resources from past levels were required, but it helped to build and use resources with more attention and strategy later on!
The game left a good impression and the harpoon sounds just made my day :D Thanks for your work!
The core mechanic is interesting. You have to rush against time and also save the right amount of resources for later, so being efficient matters. I really liked that once I understood it.
At first, I didn’t quite get how food worked, until I noticed it was going down faster as I built more structures. That was a great touch, but maybe it could be shown more clearly? Like a little popup with stats per building or something? Totally understand that this kind of thing would be for a post-compo version. Feels like you used your time really well.
I enjoyed it, the mechanics are clever, and it made me want to try again. Great job!
Lovely resource management game. The layer level is done just right. The resource collection system however is a bit unforgiving on a first play through.
That ending sounded quite dark to me :sweat_smile:
Have you used an asset pack? The game seems really polished and seems to have lots of assets for a game jam game made by two people, is one of you the main artist and the other coding? If yes, it's a great job on art as well! I really dig (hehe) the low-poly style.
There’s definitely still work to do on balancing, and the game is currently missing information about how much each building produces.
@tiar Unless there’s a bug, a lumberjack should produce 3 wood. However, something not explained in the game is that corruption applies a production penalty based on the depth it has reached, starting from 66%. So depending on the corruption’s progression, a lumberjack might end up producing only 2.
We split the work: I handled the coding, and my friend worked exclusively on the assets. I was honestly really impressed by how quickly he was able to produce them, he worked efficiently and made smart choices by reusing parts of some assets to create others.
And there’s no animation, since even simple animations would have taken significantly more time to make.
I kinda wish that there were some ways to gain other resources that you lost access to in earlier depths, but obviously the 72 hours creates a pretty stiff limit to content.
I could not advance further than the first depth, but it seems to me that it would be possible to create some alternative sources of resources. Because when you lose the surface, you lose access to the reproduction of wood, and the player cannot build 2 of 3 underground buildings because of this.
But I really like the idea of a city-building game, where you lose old buildings with and build new ones in a new place, migrating from danger.
Visually, I lacked feedback on obtaining resources, losing a layer, and also did not quite understand at the beginning where you CAN place buildings. The game says that I can not place a building here, and at first I think that I am putting it somewhere wrong, but in fact I do not have enough resources. Also in the description of lumberjack it was written to put it next to the forest. I poked around the forest until I realized that you need to put it right on the forest (because we usually don't cut down the forest to put a lumberjack there at the beginning, but put it next to it). You can see examples in Warcraft, Age of Darkness.
This is very cool, I would like to see a continuation of your idea!
I think there is a lack of some sounds and music.
Really good graphics and idea with multiple layers. Good realisation.
Great job!