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Luyuu2 years ago(+1)

Never played Hotline Miami, but this seems like that but Touhou-ified. After a bit of time sucking at the game, I got into the groove of things and it turned out pretty fun.

Ended quickly, but it's got pretty much everything for a full-length game, besides the levels. Weapons and controls feel great to use, and it's got this crazy fast-paced energy to it. The shop and augment systems seem pretty cool too, though I couldn't get enough money to afford much (at least, not without grinding). 

The story/setting is basically the total opposite of canon Touhou, and that's really cool. I love all the satire of exploitative labor culture and conservative America's stupidity and capitalism. The writing & characterization was great too, and I particularly enjoyed the whole "everything sucks but i gotta work" vibe with Reimu. Fun for the whole family, innit?

 That said, maybe there could be more integration of Touhou stuff? These characters not fitting in is clearly intentional, but I think there could be a few more things like the Shield Doll item-- usage of Touhou objects & powers in gameplay & story. Or maybe some more inclusion of the characters and youkai types as enemies-- there's enough Touhou characters that some of them could easily be used as assassination targets. Dunno, maybe that's already planned for the full game.

The visuals... wow. All the filters are really cool, though they did make it hard to see important things at times, so I toned them down quite a bit. Thanks for making them so customizable in the settings. The cutscene art wasn't the cleanest, but it's got a lotta personality.

One thing I noticed was how easy it is to be relatively stealthy. As long as you aren't shooting a loud gun, you can do pretty much anything. An enemy can be two meters away from their coworker being butchered, and not notice because they're not looking directly at the bloody mess. It's really funny, but maybe makes things too easy? Still not sure, especially considering this is only the first three levels.

In short, 'twas very promising.

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Yal2 years ago

I'm glad you like it!

  • I'd love to use more canonical touhou enemies in my fangames, but there's not actually a lot to work with (there's like fairies, moon rabbits (which are basically fairies with bunny ears), evil yin-yang orbs, PC-98 ghosts and fuzzballs, and a bunch of geometric shapes and particle effects that don't have a lot of personality - that's it). I currently only use fairies though so there's room to add more... (onis are from japanese folklore so that counts, right?)
    • (Also at least 4 more Touhou characters are in the story draft, just not introduced properly yet - Patchouli, Kokoro, Tsukasa and Eiki)
  • IMO using an actual canonical character as an assassination target would be going too far so those'll all be OCs.
  • There's at least one more direct touhou reference implant in the game already (just impossible to get legitimately right now since it unlocks for purchase after a stage that's not in the game yet), I'll try to work in some more notable ones. I'm a bit limited by effects having to be passive at the moment but there's probably some way around that. (Maybe some stuff like Sakuya's timestop being a novelty grenade, Reisen's trumpet gun etc instead of limiting to just implants could help?)
  • Yeah, I noticed stealth is way too easy at the moment (stage 2 has basically every stationary enemy facing away from the doorways which excurberates this problem), more advanced enemies have a greater vision distance/angle but I probably should make executions, vent-breaking etc make audible sound... (also maybe enemies that turn around in random directions erratically so they will spot you if you stick around)
  • Effects being so turned up it makes the game basically unplayable is mostly there to really make the first impression as impactful as possible, I can see them being grating... for the first few days of prototyping I was actually going for Cruelty Squad's "intentionally make the game as hard to enjoy as possible" vibe and tried to turn everything up to eleven, but it eventually rendered the game completely unplayable so I had to scale them back to a slightly more reasonable level. But yeah, the options are there for a reason (I got a lot of premature complaints about the old-TV effect in particular... all these people liking straight lines, smh...)
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Luyuu2 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Yeah, having weapons from the Touhou games would help a lot. Even just reskins would go a long way. As for enemies, there can probably be more variation in enemies types than the main series, since everyone just resurrects in this world. You could probably use species like tengu and kappa and regular ol' human.

I think it'd help to integrate more Touhou characters into this world even if they're not plot-relevant or assassination targets. For example, in this universe Alice could be a robotic-soldier manufacturer who sells her creations to various companies & branches, and some levels could have her dolls as generic enemies. Maybe they'd have less health than other enemies (like so weak that even your starter gohei oneshots them?) but be way more sensitive to noise. I think something like that, applied to a handful of characters, would really elevate the worldbuilding.

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Yal2 years ago

Robotic killer dolls is an awesome idea, very small enemies in large groups (like the baby skeletons outside Nito's arena in Dark Souls 1) is one of the creepiest things I know and making them make ambient robotic sounds you can hear through the 3D audio (so you can hear them slowly approach) would help really ramp up their perceived threat level...

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