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(5 edits) (+1)

Fans of the Touhou Project will feel at home with this one. Many of the core concepts are here. You have a variety of shot types to unleash carnage. Some of the shot types are gimmicky which might be able to be taken advantage of by a skilled player. There's a variety of fun puzzle-like patterns to dodge and there's a satisfying  feeling to learning the patterns and progressively getting better.

However I find that the patterns are a little too simple. I didn't see any that had the intricacy or beauty of some of the Touhou patterns. There's a lot of patterns that are just bullets fired at a straight projectory with a changing starting angle, or just a ring of bullets, or just bullets fired straight at the player. I'm not sure if there was a single pattern I was like "Wow, how was that generated!?". There's also some gimmicky patterns like the square of bullets that breaks down when it hits the floor that you see in the example gif. I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Also you can get through the second half of stage 2 on normal difficulty by standing still which is not good game design.

The bosses need to have health bars. Without health bars you cannot gauge  your progress or get a feel of how more damage higher damaging shot types do. There should be a level select option too.

The graphics harken back to early doujin games where the artwork was cute and dare I say "soulful" but far from professional. One of my gripes with the graphics is that the bullets don't really pop out from the background which makes them hard to see when dodging them. Furthermore, there's this one pattern with the stage 2 boss where snow is used to indicate the direction of the wind but I thought they were bullets at first and tried to dodge the snow. Also many of the enemies are just circles which is just uninspired. I do enjoy looking at this game nevertheless.

As for glitches the game crashed on me a couple of times and I think it was always at the stage 2 boss. I don't know if this is a problem with my PC or the game though. I also fiddled around with the options menu and somehow I had it where the graphics were all shifted to the left making the right side of my screen a black void.

At the time of writting this I made it part of the way through the stage 3 boss on normal difficulty.  If I progress further I might edit this comment. I have many more demos to play through and give feedback on.

Overall, I enjoyed myself with this game. If you're looking to scratch your bullet hell or Touhou itch - this will do it.

Hello. Thanks for the detailed feedback. I do agree the patterns are very simple, maybe due to the nature of the game (x-axis only and relatively short screen), but also because I'm not at that level of programming yet, so I prioritized gimmicks over intricate patterns. In that sense it's probably more like older shooters than Touhou, though I did take a lot from Touhou. I have trouble designing levels; stage 2 in particular I've barely changed since I first made it, so it's shorter and less well thought than the other levels. Thanks for reminding me to redesign it. Adding health bars to the bosses would be relatively simple; I'll see if I can do it.

I changed the palette of the game since the last version, so it may have messed up the contrast between the bullets and the background, especially in stage 2. I'll revise it; I also hate when I can't see the bullets on screen. Those static circles I have instead of enemies have been the exact same since the first version. I tried to change them this time when I was looking over the art, but I couldn't come up with anything better (I can't draw), so I just left them as they were. Maybe at some point they'll stop being boring circles.

I think I got something similar to your bug a long time ago, when I was making the options screen, but I can't replicate it at the moment, so I'll have to look at it later. (If you do finish the game, please do tell me if you have any more suggestions.) Thanks for playing!