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You have successfully guessed one of the mechanics I really wanted to put into the game! 

During development I kept wanting to have Shimmy have access to a “brick” or something exactly for the purpose of holding down a button of their choice. This would introduce the ability to hold up to two buttons down at a time and improve Shimmy’s multitasking capabilities in the game. At the same time, I wanted this to induce some decision-making for the player, such as figuring out which button they want to have held down or figuring out the correct timing to quickly run over and remove the brick from a button.

Funnily enough, I also thought the tedium of having to constantly manage even one brick would’ve gotten a bit silly given the size of the map so at some point we toyed with the idea of using Shimmy’s mallet instead, and give her the ability to “Thor’s hammer” itself back to her at will. This however was a fairly tricky thing to put in, as it would’ve removed some aspect of the “run around the face of a gameboy” part of the game and might’ve even ended up keeping the player just playing on one half of the map.

In the end, we also weren’t able to figure out a game to have the gameboy play until like day 2. A simple bullet hell was what we settled on because it made use of all of the d-pad and we opted for a melee system to encourage a back-and-forth between the buttons so the player doesn’t just sit on shoot after finding a blindspot. The push-back mechanic also serves the same purpose of encouraging the player to have to use the d-pad rather than chilling on the AB buttons.
(Fun fact: the gameboy micro was chosen, if not for the epic pun, because I thought the aesthetic of Shimmy running over the screen itself looked cool. We wouldn’t have been able to do that with the original gameboy)

With the bullet hell idea finally set in stone and having only 2 days left to make the whole game (we had to essentially do 2 games lol) the brick ended up being put to the side as the planned bullet hell had no reason to hold down a button without either slamming into a bullet or making running over to the other side redundant. BUT I STILL REALLY WANTED THERE TO BE A BRICK IN THE GAME >~<

Anyways oops sorry looks like my game designer mode accidentally tripped haha. Might end up just copy pasting this as a devlog since it reads so much like one already.

Thanks for playing! (And also nice ant idea we’ll consider that one hehe)

Very fun gameplay! The movement felt really smooth, having a good amount of speed to make you feel fast while still being responsive enough to be able to avoid enemies or obstacles. This paired with the camera mechanic was a fun combination, and I appreciate being able to use the camera at a range or even defensively similar to the photo games.

I like how the enemy variety mixed up the different movement strategies you have to use to avoid them. I especially like the effect the Miko lasers have on the decision-making of your movement.
The spawn scaling of the enemies resulted in there being a lot on screen at a time, but because of the health regeneration from taking photos, it felt like a fair amount of scaling. 
The introduction of tougher enemies as the levels went on was also really nicely done, and the boss fights were very interesting to play through.

The visuals in the cutscenes, portraits, and gameplay are all very pleasing to look at and the game also sounded great. Oh man that music 👌!

Very solid entry!

EIKA GET DOWN FROM THERE!!

I thought the camera bounds would stop that from happening but of course life finds a way. Thanks for pointing that out haha.

Controls really well, and defeating fairies is really satisfying. The way the slow occurs during upgrades just makes you feel really cool and I love that. The dynamic of choosing which upgrade to take at the cost of making the enemies harder is also a fun and interesting method of progression. The fairies' theme in the background is also a bop!

What a sweet little story! I enjoyed hopping around and seeing what each character needed help with, and the backgrounds were so charming. The character portraits were super cute too!

I wonder what that leaf would have been used for...

My god they're miniscule! They may be lost out in space but at least they have each other... and that ball... Sorry Mokou for my poor pong skills, hopefully it wasnt flying at exit velocity and maybe it'll come back in a couple thousand years.

Pretty funny game

Woo look at em go!! Loved playing as these goofy critters and their little animations are soo cute! The background and music work together to give a really fast-paced experience, and I really liked that silly fishing section at the start too.

Monke hehe

Very cute lil game. I love when items have neat little descriptions so going over each of em was a treat. The overall art is very good, from the menu to each item on the screen. I loved the character animations and Cirno's stretchy arm was a nice touch. 

Saishoo over here just droppin bangers, the music was a jam to groove to whilst i poisoned Mokou. And that THUD!

Looks like my cooking skills translated to this game as well, seeing as how many times Mokou got salmonella'd. 

And 24 endings!? Im gonna end up having to pull the travelling salesman strat to find those at this rate (You were right about the frog tho hehe)

I was warned somebody would pick up the lack of a spawn limit… it was definitely an oversight and totally not left out because I thought it would be funny. 

And cheers for catching that disappearing cup thing. I’ll get right onto that, as well as getting audio into here.

welp this game had me hooked.  Animations were hilarious and I just had to see each fishy! The game sorta softlocked itself when I reached 50 unique fish so i missed out on reading some of the neat fish lore. YOU crazy buggers! refreshed the page and its all still there. bravo!