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IamaMedalHunter1 year ago(+1)

Yoooo Christmas spirit is a SHmUP mechanic! This is as Touhou as it gets, I love it.

Very charming game, especially the MS paint traced sprites - idk why, I just find them really endearing.
And the story while simple and wacky, it's honestly fun.

Now, for the good ending, there's one thing that might be trouble. It's the chimneys themselves - you need to gift all of them, right? They are some stacked on top of others and they'll require some trial and error to notice (especially considering you have to watch for enemy bullets at the same time). If it was only this it'd be OK at most.
Except that there are THESE 2 particular chimneys in stage 2, that are virtually out of sight. That's deviously sneaky, and I don't mean it in a good way.
My point is, if the main objectives (that can be permanently missable) use sneaky tricks like this then that might feel unfair to some players, if not most. Since this is a short game it may be barely okay to pull this trick, but in a longer game, well...
Anyway this is just so you know. Maybe it's intended to be sneaky, but you have to know if it is not intended.
    TLDR: is it reasonable to hide main objectives behind camouflage when you're busy dodging, and is it reasonable to hide the objectives outside of the screen?

Also, I played the Jam version before ratings were open, so I tried out the Postjam version, and I really like the added Christmas Spirit mechanic! Much in-line with the theming and gameplay, definitively an improvement.

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IvChill1 year ago

I'm glad you liked that mechanic! I wasn't sure if people would be interested in that so hearing this makes me relieved.

So, about the chimneys, you are absolutely right about them, as a developer, I have 2 major flaws:

-I like to bother the player with more than 2 things to do at the same time.

-I like to pull tricks that can permanently ruin a run.

And I do those things way more than I should, in most of my games, even the simple ones, they suffer from this, for example: -I have a game where if you don't do something in a specific way your character would be more unhappy for the rest of game. -In my other game on this page (the one about vampires) in a stage if you don't fight an enemy before progressing you would miss EXP and can be underlevel with no other way to farm, in most of my games you can't go back, and I want to change that.

I'm glad you told me that because I hid those two chimneys in hope that they would be missed and the player would have to start all over again, and that's not cool (Santa won't give me a gift next Christmas for that).

Thank you for playing my game, I'll fix those two chimneys, as for the camouflage ones, I think they are fine, maybe I could tell the player at the end of the level if they missed one chimney and want to restart that level.

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