This is a lot funner than last time I played it. Did you add music? It's still extremely buggy, though. I had the following issues: the game doesn't reset properly when you press the "restart" button. The fish enemies in the first stage stay at the bottom of the screen if you don't kill them. There's a thorn-bush enemy in the third stage that is placed very badly. It essentially just shows up out of nowhere and you'll inevitably get damaged if you don't know it's there. I feel like it's supposed to spawn at least a couple dozen pixels lower.
The pause key is set to the ESC key, so if you pause the game it kicks you out of fullscreen (in Firefox. Not a bug but it bothers me). This is just a game design consideration: the length of the side of the witch girl's hit-box seems to be the same or close to the same length as the diameter of the circle representing it, which is not a good idea since circles aren't shaped the same as boxes (I hope this makes sense). In Touhou I think it's 2-3 pixels smaller than the circle. At least one of the boss attacks starts too early, causing the animation that starts the attack to obstruct the action.
I didn't like the farm girl's second pattern (the one with the scarecrows). You're not able to kill the scarecrows so she can simply shoot them in your face. I don't feel it's awfully hard to dodge but it makes hitting the boss a hassle since it limits your movement. The other patterns are fun. I liked the ghost girl's patterns, but the last one seems to spawn bullets on top of you.
Rosemary's homing bullets are very finicky. Some times they'll home in, but sometimes they won't. I can't figure them out.
Overall I found it pretty fun, but please fix the bugs!
This game is a Touhou-esque shoot 'em up and has many of the joys (and pains) one expects from such a game. There is joy to slowly learning the game and overcoming once seemingly unpassable obstacles. There is a rush to dodging a large number of projectiles. Unfortunately, this is where my praise ends.
The level design is a mess. Enemies appear on screen at seemingly random positions and there is no sense of cohesion. Levels do not have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Enemies use the same overly-simplistic patterns of firing directly at the player and bullet rings. This makes the levels unfun and all feel the same. At the end of level 1 there's this part where there are scarecrows at the bottom of the screen and I found it's far easier to ignore them and stay at the top of the screen. This does not come off as good level design. The difficulty curve is also strange. I swear level 1 is more difficult than levels 2 and 3. I also wish your bombs reset after taking a hit or at least there were more of them.
There's only two shot types to choose from and I would have liked more. The game claims Rosemary is the easier shot type but I found that she makes the game much harder. Her homing pumpkins do basically no damage. I'm not sure if her bomb does any damage to bosses. Lucy is so much better. At full power she kicks so much ass. Neither shot type feels inspired though.
The patterns the bosses fire are overly simple and lack the puzzle-like thrill I expect from these games. If you're at full power as Lucy the stage 2 and 3 bosses have too little health such that their patterns end way too soon. The first boss has this attack where the boss spawns scarecrows near the player and it's dumb and should be removed from the game. The end of the stage 3 boss didn't communicate that I first had to kill enemies before I could damage the boss. It also would have been nice to see some dialogue between the player and the bosses before the fight.
The graphics harken back to early doujin games where the artwork was cute and dare I say "soulful" but far from professional. I like that the backgrounds are layered and use parallax scrolling. However there's some weird things like the debug text is on screen and the end level text is misaligned.
This demo is super buggy. After you restart after losing all of your continues the enemies don't spawn in anymore. After using a bomb as Rosemary she was stuck on her glowing sprite after the bomb ended. There's also an explosion sound effect in the game that's super distracting. I kept thinking I was getting hit.
This game needs to be overhauled to become a great shoot 'em up.
well I didnt think anyone would be able to complete it in the current state (I couldnt check the bugs of the upload until much later), so good job with that! and also because some spells were very hard even for me (as insane intended, though I still think some of them are too easy and instead of more spam need more creativity in their construction)
and I know its a mess, it will get better! (hopefully)
I'll focus more on pointing out the few bugs I encountered since I can barely last more than 3 seconds before I get wiped lol.
The restart option doesn't seem to function properly. Enemies never respawn. If you go back to the main menu and start the game the level starts as normal though.
I experienced a crash the first time I used the bomb with rosemary. Unfortunately I didn't think to copy the error code and I haven't been able to replicate it since. I do recall the error message mentioning something about a function not existing though.
Pressing Z on the "Back" button in the jukebox menu won't take you back to the main menu. You have to press X twice. The options menu lets you do this so it's a bit of an inconsistency. I'm also not sure what exactly the jukebox does since the music does not change no matter which option you press Z on. If it ends up being a music selection menu maybe have it so you can preview the song?
Unironically huge fan of the decision to disable normal difficulty in favor of insane mode for the demo. Only real sicko witches can appreciate this joint.
Please don’t use X/Z binds if you don’t localise. Did a run using only Z, as other keys are too far from Z, found some bugs for you: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2345981802
Comments
This is a lot funner than last time I played it. Did you add music? It's still extremely buggy, though. I had the following issues: the game doesn't reset properly when you press the "restart" button. The fish enemies in the first stage stay at the bottom of the screen if you don't kill them. There's a thorn-bush enemy in the third stage that is placed very badly. It essentially just shows up out of nowhere and you'll inevitably get damaged if you don't know it's there. I feel like it's supposed to spawn at least a couple dozen pixels lower.
The pause key is set to the ESC key, so if you pause the game it kicks you out of fullscreen (in Firefox. Not a bug but it bothers me). This is just a game design consideration: the length of the side of the witch girl's hit-box seems to be the same or close to the same length as the diameter of the circle representing it, which is not a good idea since circles aren't shaped the same as boxes (I hope this makes sense). In Touhou I think it's 2-3 pixels smaller than the circle. At least one of the boss attacks starts too early, causing the animation that starts the attack to obstruct the action.
I didn't like the farm girl's second pattern (the one with the scarecrows). You're not able to kill the scarecrows so she can simply shoot them in your face. I don't feel it's awfully hard to dodge but it makes hitting the boss a hassle since it limits your movement. The other patterns are fun. I liked the ghost girl's patterns, but the last one seems to spawn bullets on top of you.
Rosemary's homing bullets are very finicky. Some times they'll home in, but sometimes they won't. I can't figure them out.
Overall I found it pretty fun, but please fix the bugs!
many thanks ! I will fix the bugs! and there's a few stages remaining to add so it should have more to offer later on.
I completed all three stages.
This game is a Touhou-esque shoot 'em up and has many of the joys (and pains) one expects from such a game. There is joy to slowly learning the game and overcoming once seemingly unpassable obstacles. There is a rush to dodging a large number of projectiles. Unfortunately, this is where my praise ends.
The level design is a mess. Enemies appear on screen at seemingly random positions and there is no sense of cohesion. Levels do not have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Enemies use the same overly-simplistic patterns of firing directly at the player and bullet rings. This makes the levels unfun and all feel the same. At the end of level 1 there's this part where there are scarecrows at the bottom of the screen and I found it's far easier to ignore them and stay at the top of the screen. This does not come off as good level design. The difficulty curve is also strange. I swear level 1 is more difficult than levels 2 and 3. I also wish your bombs reset after taking a hit or at least there were more of them.
There's only two shot types to choose from and I would have liked more. The game claims Rosemary is the easier shot type but I found that she makes the game much harder. Her homing pumpkins do basically no damage. I'm not sure if her bomb does any damage to bosses. Lucy is so much better. At full power she kicks so much ass. Neither shot type feels inspired though.
The patterns the bosses fire are overly simple and lack the puzzle-like thrill I expect from these games. If you're at full power as Lucy the stage 2 and 3 bosses have too little health such that their patterns end way too soon. The first boss has this attack where the boss spawns scarecrows near the player and it's dumb and should be removed from the game. The end of the stage 3 boss didn't communicate that I first had to kill enemies before I could damage the boss. It also would have been nice to see some dialogue between the player and the bosses before the fight.
The graphics harken back to early doujin games where the artwork was cute and dare I say "soulful" but far from professional. I like that the backgrounds are layered and use parallax scrolling. However there's some weird things like the debug text is on screen and the end level text is misaligned.
This demo is super buggy. After you restart after losing all of your continues the enemies don't spawn in anymore. After using a bomb as Rosemary she was stuck on her glowing sprite after the bomb ended. There's also an explosion sound effect in the game that's super distracting. I kept thinking I was getting hit.
This game needs to be overhauled to become a great shoot 'em up.
well I didnt think anyone would be able to complete it in the current state (I couldnt check the bugs of the upload until much later), so good job with that!
and also because some spells were very hard even for me (as insane intended, though I still think some of them are too easy and instead of more spam need more creativity in their construction)
and I know its a mess, it will get better! (hopefully)
Cute witch designs.
I'll focus more on pointing out the few bugs I encountered since I can barely last more than 3 seconds before I get wiped lol.
The restart option doesn't seem to function properly. Enemies never respawn. If you go back to the main menu and start the game the level starts as normal though.
I experienced a crash the first time I used the bomb with rosemary. Unfortunately I didn't think to copy the error code and I haven't been able to replicate it since. I do recall the error message mentioning something about a function not existing though.
Pressing Z on the "Back" button in the jukebox menu won't take you back to the main menu. You have to press X twice. The options menu lets you do this so it's a bit of an inconsistency. I'm also not sure what exactly the jukebox does since the music does not change no matter which option you press Z on. If it ends up being a music selection menu maybe have it so you can preview the song?
Unironically huge fan of the decision to disable normal difficulty in favor of insane mode for the demo. Only real sicko witches can appreciate this joint.
Please don’t use X/Z binds if you don’t localise. Did a run using only Z, as other keys are too far from Z, found some bugs for you: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2345981802
Final console lines:
Good job making it in!!!
Right, I will add custom keybinds next update.
(I wasnt sure if to upload because of all the bugs, so thanks for checking it anyway)