Unguided and seeking, you find yourself drawn to the village of Ulthar. Your sudden presence is a reminder of the incident with their cats decades ago, but your influence soon drowns out the villagers’ alarm. As otherworldly ashes fall from the sky, you begin preparations.
\nPlay with your keyboard and race against the clock in this eerie pixel-art resource simulation game.
\n","source":"elliot-nelson/js13k-2025-ashes-of-ulthar","stars":0,"dc":"https://ashes-of-ulthar.7tonshark.com","post":"https://7tonshark.com/posts/making-of-js13k-2025-ashes-of-ulthar/","comments":[{"at":410383297,"author":"Mohammad Jawad","login":"mhmdjawad","gh":22205462,"url":"https://pdemia.com/","text":"wow the graphics are live, the idea is cool and would try again, nicely done work on the flow of the game and the animated villagers, so much motion after you have plenty of villagers you start to lose focus on what is going on. trick to read what is costs vs benfits before the upgrades and keep eye on resources so you dont have much of something and none of another
\n","games":["The Familiar"]},{"at":410429277,"author":"Sebastian Dorn","login":"sebadorn","gh":1146318,"url":"https://sebadorn.de","text":"Love the atmosphere and game overall! From the shadowy-green color scheme to the music and this impending sense of doom caused by the draining sanity.\nUnfortunately a little bit to hard for me. Best I got was 1 seal lifted.
\nOne issue: In Firefox the game doesn’t expand to the available area and stays very small.
\n","games":["Black Cat Potions"]},{"at":410429473,"author":"Dmytro Kozhukhar","login":"dkozhukhar","gh":424523,"text":"cool graphics and nice incremental game, congrats.\nnice dark theme
\n","games":["Cat Shooter Ritual Catacombs"]},{"at":410475938,"author":"Noumisyifa Nabila","login":"numshv","gh":149067096,"twitter":"numshv","text":"All i could say is A HUGE FAN OF THE GRAPHICS AAAAAAAAAAAAA
\n","games":["Clawstruck"]},{"at":410489587,"author":"Javi Agenjo","login":"jagenjo","gh":393515,"url":"http://tamats.com","twitter":"tamat","text":"Such a great entry, the visuals, the gameplay, the way it presents the information to the player, the atmosphere, the song… Im amazed by your craftmanship.
\nMy only complaint is that I had to raise the hand to press ESC to exit the codex, I felt pressing C again should close it.
\nAlso it took me a while to understand that you can transfer workers from roles, I didnt understand the left and right arrows and thought it was just to leave them idle. It would be cool that it displayed how many idle workers you have.
\nAlso, it is hard to understand where are the resources going, maybe showing a -1 or +1 on to of the characters would help.
\nAmazing work.
\n","games":["Pacific Black Cats"]},{"at":410489750,"author":"Benjamin Boyd Austin","login":"bbaustin","gh":18755168,"text":"Very awesome graphics and overall design. Nice music to go with the dark atmosphere you have going
\nMy high score was 1851
\nMy wish is that viewing the codex would pause the sanity meter depletion. It was a bit hard to concentrate on the details of each upgrade while aware that I’m going insane
\nI will come back to play more, though! Very atmospheric and fun
\n","games":["VOID Cat"]},{"at":410603461,"author":"Martin Tale","login":"MartinTale","gh":5662612,"url":"https://martintale.com/","text":"Honestly, an amazing game.. This could be a genuine hit in the incremental/idle game scene and I highly recommend posting about it on Reddit, etc.. 5 stars for everything, I’m super impressed 🥰
\n","games":["Pet-A-Cat","Black Cat Chat"]},{"at":410633747,"author":"Cliff Earl","login":"Antix-Development","gh":17822130,"text":"On my Windows 11 PC, it doesn;t resize correctly to fill the screen in FireFox, Chrome resizes just fine. FireFox reports “This page is in Quirks Mode. Page layout may be impacted. For Standards Mode use “”.”
\nI was confused when I managed to unlock the butcher but there was no “recruit butcher” button. After a bit I pressed “v” and got a butcher.
\nAnyway, really nice production. Top notch graphics and audio. Gameplay is pretty nice but I think the codex is confusing so the sanity meter should stop going down while your mind is being taxed by it ;)
\n","games":["Black Cat - Nine Lives, No Mercy"]},{"at":410693022,"author":"Ryan Tyler","login":"tyler6699","gh":50468,"url":"https://carelesslabs.co.uk","text":"Great game, well made and really cool pixel art. Have played through a few times and have not yet worked out the best strategy as I am dying after a few minutes.
\nThis is one I will come back to and try to better my score on!
\n","games":["Yarn Run"]},{"at":410734189,"author":"Anthony Cosgrave","login":"anthonycosgrave","gh":1410114,"url":"https://imtoospexy.com/","text":"This has such a great style, the game idea is clever and the music fits it really well. Overall a really well put together entry.
\n","games":["Chickpocalypse Meow"]},{"at":410757643,"author":"xem","login":"xem","gh":1225909,"text":"Impressive graphics, sound, ambiance and concept. Congrats.
\n","games":["I got up on the wrong foot"]},{"at":410801579,"author":"smhaaker","login":"smhaaker","gh":10542292,"text":"Completely love the style and graphics of this game. Innovative as well. Loved it.
\n","games":["CatNFish"]},{"at":410908283,"author":"Emre Guneyler","login":"eguneys","gh":3844764,"url":"https://eguneys.github.io/jsgames/","text":"Splendid player experience, with an awesome game play to really hook the player for quite some time. One obvious complaint is the controls are awkward and the difficulty is quite tricky at the start. It drains so fast I don’t have time to unlock the sacrifice, and even then sacrifice has a timer that replenish slower than the stamina drains, I didn’t get it.
\n","games":["Mor Chess 2","Mor Chess"]},{"at":411013512,"author":"Eoin McGrath","login":"eoinmcg","gh":96340,"url":"http://eoinmcgrath.com","twitter":"eoinmcg","text":"Wow! This looks and feels amazing. Great job in creating atmosphere. Great game.
\n","games":["KleptoKitty"]},{"typ":2,"at":411037740,"author":"Victor Debone","login":"debone","gh":763457,"url":"https://javascri.pl/","twitter":"javascripl","text":"Hello! Thanks for your submission to js13k!\nI’m not aware of how much time you spent on your game, so excuse me if things I mention were in your mind, but got left out in the rush of the month or just because you hit the 13kb limit :)
\nI really enjoyed the game! The music isn’t overbearing, the pixel art colors are pleasant, and it’s fun experimenting with different resource allocation strategies. The animations are well done, and it’s super cool that you get to play as an evil genius cat! Great work! 😺🎮
\n","games":["Cat Survivors"]},{"at":411349691,"author":"Jasper Renow-Clarke","login":"picosonic","gh":26137750,"twitter":"femtosonic","text":"A really engaging, yet dark game
\nGraphics were awesome, with the look of an old GameBoy game, although the window size was tiny (would be nice to scale up)
\nThe music was really well done, and atmospheric
\nI thought initially I was going to be able to move the cat around, but soon realised that the movement was just for the menus
\nAfter realising I needed to make more villagers than just the woodcutter, the game opened up for me and I understood the assignment
\n","games":["Mochi and the midnight escape"]},{"at":411383027,"author":"IsleOfDann","login":"IsleOfDann","gh":232171537,"text":"Very good presentation and gameplay loop. The theme definitely felt bolted on, rather than a central design point.
\n"},{"at":411707029,"author":"smiley405","login":"smiley405","gh":66162073,"url":"https://rlimbu.com/","text":"I loved the game’s presentation and concept, great music and nice pixel art! I especially liked the color palette, and I totally dig the unlock system.
\nMy final score was 739
🎨 Really nice! I didn’t notice right away that I had to go into the codec to unlock the next part. The 5-color graphics are beautifully done, and the atmosphere is very immersive.
\n","games":["Witchcat"]}],"results":{"theme":{"rank":60,"min":1,"score":3.37,"max":4.24},"innovation":{"rank":26,"min":1.2,"score":3.44,"max":4.03},"gameplay":{"rank":13,"min":1.18,"score":3.67,"max":4.37},"graphics":{"rank":10,"min":1.6,"score":4.26,"max":4.56},"audio":{"rank":6,"min":1.75,"score":4.07,"max":4.22},"controls":{"rank":48,"min":1.6,"score":3.48,"max":4.45},"primary":{"rank":10,"min":8.68,"score":22.3,"max":24.89},"label":"Overall"}}