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Thanks! I've learnt from this one of my very-first-attended gamejam that preferences of the masses would affect the score, but score doesn't really matter in jams as feedbacks are always the precious ones here.

Currently I'm thinking that if this could be a complete game with more stages and mechanisms, a free-play mode would compensate for this; also, I'm thinking about adjusting the beat mechanism so that somehow sone could always feel that he/she is tapping on beat (in real it would be off-beat, with different tempo or whatever).

Glad you like it :)

Thank you! I watched your video. Nicely done and congrats!

Although I tried to merge the concepts from rhythm games and puzzle-based bullet-hell games, still I'm doing too bad on fine-tuning the mechanism and making better sound/graphic design, so thanks a lot for your precious live-play feedback. I would like to see if I can push this concept to some better implementations.

Thanks for your comment! The shield gives a much lower requirement to pass the game compared with the same game without a shield but has limited lifes. Also, losing the shield may encourage the player to restore it quickly, which is expected to be how casual players do the game. I don't know if I'm on the right way, but with more feedbacks I can get into this genre much more better, and hopefully recreating a better one.

The bullet hell things really depends on the game engine. The engine used for this game is custom-made and lightweight, so it won't do a lot of other transform logics creating unnecessary overheads. Actually you can do this with glfw or other similar graphics libraries.

The bullet logic is calculated in some way that the engine don't have to frequently update the bullet states. Every bullet has bullet state consists of position, velocity(in axial speeds or rotation+speed) and acceleration values (angular velocity+linear acceleration), and the position and velocity values are both updated every frame.

As for spawners, there are no actual spawners, but all bullets have an option of being spawned from any of the enemies. As I use Lua for the game script, every "spawner" is actually one cycle of a for loop, with a series of tasks and bullets assigned to a spawned enemy.

The tempo change was designed as part of the introduction, as I thought it's easier to start slower and gradually gains speed; from your feedback I feel this actually bad for new players. If there are more stages, I would definately give a constant tempo for all early stages.

This is a totally conventional shooter design, and I think maybe some innovation design would be better but meh, I was used to design those bullet patterns in this conventional way.

Well done! The game is fun enough for be to pass the entire level (although I did it in a single try), The bass effect conbined with the coins works well, and the connection of background music between levels behaves well (not until the last few stages did I find out that the BGM was actually changing and getting more intense). In all, nicely polished. I hope this could be the top 1 game in the jam.

The game works fine, however I didn't see the point of platforms synced to the music. Maybe some background music with more sense of rhythm would work better for this game.

I didn't see any points specifically intriguing in bullet patterns, but good job on making the stages. Hope you have the audio working for all stages and hope to see more creations in stage designs.

This is a fun game that I would like to have a lot of tries on it. One problem in the aspect of difficulty: It would be better if enemies shows some visual effects before firing; as enemies fire bullets with high velocity, visual effects before firing makes the enemies actions more predictable.

Seems that this is something that people would do in regular rhythm games -- they "map" or "chart" for a music piece.

Something else to mention about: That 16th notes are to fast to catch. Maybe it is better if there are note visualizing effects.

Didn't see any innovations in game mechanics, but this game is actually fun for me. Some immediate improvements could be slowing down the bullets, and also introduce more patterns for different types of enemies.

Welp, the difficulty ruined the fun of playing this game. However I can make this any easier, as there is possibility that one passes the game by only tapping the rhythm without moving (you can try it yourself as well).

Thumb up to this game. I like the learning curve of the pitch-row-mapping mechanic. In some way, I suggest prevent spiders from staying still when the player moves to make the spiders' movements more predictable.

Now you have it: The retry button!

P.S. Check out that bonus hint on "Congratulations!" screen :)

Here's the BGM on SoundCloud. Put on your headphones and enjoy!

Here's the BGM on SoundCloud. Enjoy!

Good idea! Any thoughts of making the motions of the spheres synchronized to some rhythm or some modifications in physics so to snap the landing positions on to the keys?
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Update: The audio design works well for this game. It might sounds better if there is a internal compressor for all those sound effects, since one can easily stack a lot of the spheres on stage.

I made this with a custom-made engine, which is basically a wrapper of DirectX 9 with basic support of rhythm mechanics and Lua scripting.

Planning to do so! (If only I'm determined to spend time on this...)

The strategy is more clear when you go for a high score, but for casual plays the there are indeed a lot of solutions.

Thanks and let's see what's the result 😏

Not enough time when I do the jam :sad:

The art of designing bullet-hell shooter games. Everyone could have a different solution to stages, and no solution is optimal for every player.

Glad to see you agree with my ideas! Thanks for your reply and have fun with the game!

That's a main drawback of this hybrid game mechanics. You have to however condition your both hands in good control of the ship, like drawing a circle with your left hand but drawing a square with your right hand simultaneously. In compensation of this drawback I tried not introduce anti-rhythm patterns of bullets and for all purposes I'm glad to see this worked.

Good mechanics! The last level showed the possibility of making puzzles with limited field of view.  Hope to see more released levels. Good job!

Updated: I uploaded a video of current version of the game with slightly changed background music. Hope you enjoy it.

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Original post:

For quick expression, here is a record of older versions of the game. The level design in the video almost the same as the latest version, but the background music is slightly modified in the latest version. Hope you like it!

For a quick expression, here is a record of older versions of the game. It's almost the same as the latest version. Hope you like the music and the design of bullet patterns/puzzles.