Thank you so much for the kind words and feedback.
First, the bugs;
- pause menu lock is troubling, i'll need to get that fixed.
- Momiji's prompt stays up because the input the game is looking for is actually Suu -greeting-, which she cant do while being held. This was on my to do list to adjust either hiding the input if she can't greet or allowing the raw input to work.
- The card selection doesn't have an effect if they don't do a little -shine- effect. The wiggle means that it doesn't do anything.
a few tips and thoughts on the notes;
-Gameplay is very hard right now. Enemies are all much more aggressive than many of them should be and the pace is very fast. Enemy AI has been a very tricky area that's been churning a lot recently until I took a break from it this last week to do portrait art/display systems. Beyond that though, the game on a mechanical level is still very tough, and it's something I'm always on the look out to ease if possible.
-GunDoll (and all of the dolls) are generally very tough. They all use the player's moveset, so you don't have much of a built in advantage in speed/power. It sounds like a potential bug if Grazing through one of the GunDoll's attacks isn't giving weakness reveals, though. The Gun doesn't aim upwards, so you can play around the shape of its hitbox with air-approaches.
-Gashadokuro is actually fairly weak to grabs. (More seriously this enemy needs deeper work. Their moveset has been largely unchanged through a lot of other changes and it's -weird- comparatively. Kind of the case with most enemies, but Gashadokuro sticks due to its size and power). Enemies can be made to path back to their origin spot by moving away from them. There is a range past their spawn point that they don't like to engage past (in the 11/4 version), though if you are -between them and their spawn- they will stay engaged since their retreat is blocked.
-The gold freeze hits are a Clash, which happens if two characters hit each other on the exact some frame. Basically the effect is the (~40frame) freeze and both attackers super-armor through that hit. It's kind of a signal that it's time to -quickdraw-, since both characters are allowed to cancel their moves normally. (Red Canceling here is very strong since it's technically the fastest move.)
i'll be brief here, for a few words on yourlighter thoughts;
-first, ty so much for sharing your thoughts!!
-Gaji is a weird one. She's a bunraku ghost puppeteer, who is definitely on the [Playing Games] side of that spectrum (as a fun aside; her name comes from the Hanafuda Storm card, which is a sort of Wildcard in some rulesets. Hanafuda figures into so much stuff in this project, tbh). I haven't fully settled all of the stuff between Suu/Gaji/Momiji/Matsu, so it can come across as inconsistent, especially going off of previous versions.