itch.io

hey, jam host / rules person here. just so you're aware - if a game has a game-breaking bug (such as a .pck file missing that results in the game failing to launch, which seems to be the case here?), we do permit/encourage participants to fix those bugs within the voting period. 

sort of! [caesar cipher+3] wkh lpsolfdwlrq lv [phdqw wr eh] wkdw vkh'v vrph ydulhwb ri dfh/ghplvhaxdo; dqg wkxv zrxog rqob jhw bxul erqxvhv iurp uhlvhq ehlqj suhvhqw suredeob

should be public now, just was cleaning up a couple build issues orz

minimum spec that I've tested personally is a laptop with a Nvidia 960M, though I believe people have run it on lower specs; in terms of disk space, it's 290mb when uncompressed

reporting briefly here from 172030 score territory: i was not expecting snowboard-tricks suwapyon. everything is lasers. please [REDACTED] my jump finger hurts just let me snowboard home to drink hot cocoa in peace pl e ase

powerpoint tutorial was gr8 btw

edit: 231210 points. it is done. i am free

also kept going until 320220 points because i felt bad leaving marisa with no health (and wanted to do some no-pressure snowboarding)

F opens reload screen yep, then (once you have at least one magazine and bullets collected) you can:

1. left click the magazine button (bottommost, unmarked gray rectangle) to put bullets into it
2. left click the "load magazine" button (middle, marked with upward arrow) to put the magazine into the rifle

after that, the player character should automatically operate the bolt to chamber a bullet, at which point shooting can occur!

its true mimi-chan wishes she could drift like this

it was specifically the castlevania 64 main menu/violin rendition of it i was listening to at the time that gave me the idea but yup haha - spent probably a week wondering why the melody sounded so familiar and then it hit me one day, so we ran with it

heya, ran into a variety of Technical Issues that delayed building/release by a bunch, page should be public now

ah the shovel's just, really good - the AoE damage makes it easy to wipe swarms of enemies quickly, swings deleting bullets makes later/higher-density enemy attacks far more survivable, and there's enough of a cooldown between swings that it's easy to trigger the coin autocollect while maintaining damage output

somehow i didn't register that the enemy spawn points were tied to points in the environment (despite recognizing that enemies always spawned in big groups at the top/bottom and in smaller groups around the edges) until i saw this/went back and looked at gameplay video i recorded, maybe adding animations for the doors opening would make that more obvious

overall the randomness is good in a lot of ways as-is i think (likely due to the grab-bag algorithm, i did feel that the time i spent with each weapon was fairly equal, and even with spawn points i started getting a semi-accurate sense for whether a big top/bottom wave or a room-perimeter wave was coming next, after a while); so likely all that's needed really is the additional visual telegraphing, to give the player a quarter-second heads-up on where they should be stepping away from

almost gave up when i couldn't jump the first gap (before noticing there was a Run key) but i'm so glad i kept going and bore witness to the glory that is penguin pajama sakuya

alt tabbed for a bit to type something and did not expect there to be a slow idle animation of sanae nodding off

gameplay-wise the machine gun miracle melee is funny to watch in action but i think i wound up liking using the slide more for combat

it does look like the inner folder name had some strange symbols in it - renamed both that and the folder above it and it's still throwing the same error, though (except it opens in fullscreen instead of a window?)

EDIT: searched the error and found this stackoverflow answer - selected Unblock in the .zip properties, re-extracted it, and now it runs without the error coming up..i guess it was just a windows security thing

unfortunately it seems i'm also stuck at the main menu now though ahah (left clicking doesn't do anything? though i can toggle in/out of one submenu and quit by pressing W and E)

pretty solid danmaku script that hits the sweet spot of challenging-enough-to-stay-interesting-but-not-excessively-difficult for me, with nice music (left the game open just to listen to the menu music at some point); liked the aesthetics of the Sinister Dreamcatcher card in particular

one bug noticed - playing back a replay doesn't seem to stop the menu music, so both the menu and game music play simultaneously until the replay ends

i'm not fully sure what i just experienced but i think i learned some history by googling names

glad hong xiuquan had his moment to shine (literal) despite doremy bringing him in for kicks

took a few plays to figure out how things worked but pretty fun once did - something strangely satisfying about running around grabbing stopwatches quickly / knifing as many enemies as possible before diving into the time machine to refresh the level layout, ad infinitum

i think other commenters have already said some of these things but: 

• visuals/colors very clean and readable; sakuya squish good
• music playing back over itself definitely something to address, especially considering this seems meant to be score-attacked repeatedly
• enemies spawning on top of the player without warning wasn't great but they did get easier to deal with once i realized i could just run through them to avoid their attacks, instead of trying to hop over their heads / getting hit by jumping too late
• high score counter appears to track previous score, not high score

curious to see what you do with the story, feels like there's some potential for cool stuff there

also high score: 

simple but aesthetic; something disproportionately interesting about seeing touhou's gaprealm and moon in explorable 3D environment form

my first instinct was to look over the edge of the gaprealm road and then fall off, which i repeated every time i returned to it

it seems i can't run it, throws a fatal error on startup (can continue but the game never progresses past the loading screen) - 

System.NotSupportedException: An attempt was made to load an assembly from a network location which would have caused the assembly to be sandboxed in previous versions of the .NET Framework. This release of the .NET Framework does not enable CAS policy by default, so this load may be dangerous. If this load is not intended to sandbox the assembly, please enable the loadFromRemoteSources switch. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155569 for more information.
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly.nLoadFile(String path, Evidence evidence)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(String path)
   at All_codes.Dll_char_info.Make_info(Int32 index, String file, String class_name)
   at All_codes.Dll_char_info.Find_all_dll()
   at All_codes.Form_manage.Form1_Shown(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Form.OnShown(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallbackHelper(Object obj)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallback(ThreadMethodEntry tme)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallbacks()

so i had enough fun playing/attempting to scorerun this that i was only stopped by my left hand becoming physically incapable of continuing to control the character, and had to return the next day to keep going

but uhh feedback:

• guns all nice n punchy but also tangibly unique from each other in operation, which works great with the being-forced-to-swap mechanic - there's a slight learning curve to every weapon such that the forced swap also requires changing playstyle quickly
• shovel shift always ends too early. always
• misses seemed most frequently due to enemies spawning on top of me without warning; i guess there's also no delay clouds on bullets (i.e. they spawn instantly) which made reacting to them basically impossible sometimes, so staying alive longer/getting better scores often meant getting lucky multiple times on prefiring enemy spawn positions, and/or timely shovel/rocket launcher swaps
• small touch but i like how the score/money field was labeled "stonks"
• music and art good; idk exactly what bunny girl's deal is but fighting fiercely while trapped in corporate (bullet) hell indefinitely is a big mood

current highscore is $29,950,475 (average "good" run has been $17m to $19m but i got particularly lucky once), i rate it would-risk-hand-health-again out of 10

hah - yep being able to damage the boss before the fight starts was an oversight, i noticed it during later testing but figured it was minor enough to leave unfixed for jam submissions (optional difficulty modifier? perhaps)

probably will add headshotting when i get around to expanding this; nerve system is supposed to feel a bit frustrating in that it's simulating fatigue, values/formulas could likely use tweaking though - i think rn it caps at 50% penalty regardless of nerves level for example

nice haha

did try to take it a bit easy when designing boss A thinking that it'd be the one most people would find first, so good to hear the difficulty spike is working roughly as intended

it's time gated, essentially - you have to increase hidden stat at a rate faster than 1 per day on average, and once day 10 hits you're locked into a boss + ending

interesting that there's an option to fast-fall by pressing down after a jump, admittedly harder to get use out of when mystia starts hopping too high for youmu to reach

i played a second time to see what happened when i failed and was so happy to see mystia's scale decrease until it went negative

sure!

see you dream gardener,,,

multiple windows thing is super neat, fits nicely with the idea of wandering through stacks of junk (the detritus of my desktop) in a way

can hug midair/10

short but sweet; neat to me how much personality is imbued/conveyed in reimu just interacting with different parts of the room

the expression reimu makes when looking at `the big orb` has big pikasurprise energy, lov it

stage gameplay was a bit overwhelming at first but got significantly easier once i remembered how to press X before getting hit; found dodging nue patterns most fun; did feel like most of the patterns were streaming-based tho

sound effects being spoken "pew" and "bzz" and "oh no" was pretty gr8

nya/10 amulet sprites called me 22/7

there's something intensely comedic about the timing with which marisa immediately tackles cirno off the left side of the screen, pausing for a beat where the visible playing field has no characters on it, only for a victory screen to appear a moment later

also poor remi having her house invaded for basically no reason (does feel in-character for gensokyo tho)

also liked how the main menu/background changed after reaching the ending, nice small detail that i almost didn't notice

for a minute I thought this might only be touhou-themed sokoban but then the bullet mechanics came out and the puzzles turned really interesting?? (the only level I wasn't able to solve was sakuya's first one; quite enjoyed figuring out tenshi and sakuya 2 levels)

miscellaneous thoughts in no particular order:

• slightly unintuitive to start game/navigate UI (attempted clicking Start Game at first only for nothing to happen; expected dialogue to progress with Z but it turned out to be left/right - being able to go backwards in dialogue is nice though); also didn't realize talking to Kisume was necessary to start levels until went to download instead of playing web version and saw the instruction there; in windows version - thought orange text on main menu meant "selected" and accidentally quit a couple times before figuring out white text was what was selected
• dialogue before/after/between every level is nice (hehe tsundere patchy)
• art is pretty high detail for a jam game which is cool
• remilia used Strongest Attack, DANMAKU IN TIGHT HALLWAYS (also remi x kisume huh. well then)

i'm not sure how to describe the experience this game gave me but i was indeed amused (i think that's good right)

images were way too big for a 1080p monitor but i did zoom out the page in time to see the FNF scene fully so there's that

oh no i'm officially a bad influence

glad to hear it though, and thanks for playing again!

The sword meter can also be charged gradually by grazing bullets (graze radius is about 3 meters), maybe that's where the free meter was coming from? 

and heck performance issues again,  think i mentioned it on discord already but i'll def be addressing those postjam; some of the performance-minded infrastructure that was put in place for yuuka souls 1 postjam didn't make it into this one because of how many systems got rewritten from scratch, plus those 34 soldiers sitting in the basement having their AI active at all times probably aren't helping much

Despite the mention of not having an artist, the visuals on this are rather pretty - sword slash and bouncing knife effects in particular. I also like how knives can bounce off each other (and slashes it looked like?).

These are some fun puzzle mechanics though I think I solved some of the harder ones purely by trial and error/luck oops. Water droplet mechanics weren't super obvious and I thought they had to be selected to activate at first, figured out they were based on action count when droplets with differing counts started showing up in later levels though.

Simple but very effective. Window for inputs is more precise than I expected, but also not so precise that I ever dropped combo as a result of it (that only happened when messing up between rhythm switches), so nice balance there.

One thing was that a lack of a beat before the ball passing started meant that getting starting could be a bit iffy; I also found myself syncopated off the down beat a number of times - minor but sometimes resulted in my timing getting messed up by the 12/1234 switches being off-measure relative to the music.

Cutesy art but dark premise - I can see why Reisen wanted to leave the moon if this was what she was being ordered to do.

Gameplay loop on this is surprisingly tight, in a good way; I was able to build a decent time buffer by the last day or two but I game overed a couple times when I was figuring out how to play/dallied for even a moment early on.

I almost didn't try scanning the QR code but now I'm glad I did extra Audio category point just for that

Real nice visual aesthetic on this intro and menu in particular. Patterning was solid; homing shot seemed to have relatively niche use (i.e. it was only useful when the denser hard mode patterning made it so hitting things with strong shot wasn't an option); discovering that specific background blocks could be broken for score bonuses was neat.

Thought it was a bit strange that the entire game seems to restart upon clearing/failing the stage.

loaded every type of shot into the gun at once and yuyuko died in two shots gg

Like the idea of this, though the shottypes could probably use some balancing - I felt like bouncing + spread (+ explosive) was pretty much all I needed to solve my problems; pierce was somewhat useful for going through boxes but the boxes are destroyed by regular shots pretty quickly already (and can be circumvented by bounce shots - maybe piercing would have more utility if it pierced through enemies as well?), and homing has enough of a curve on it that I had to stand at pretty precise positions to get it to hit enemies around corners.

Similarly the balancing on the bossfight was such that it either went one way or the other - on my first playthrough, I deleted Yuyuko's health so quickly that she didn't have a chance to start attacking, then on a second playthrough, I refrained from firing for a few seconds to see what her patterns looked like only to find that she spawned too many/densely packed rockets to dodge and was deleted before I could do any damage.

Sound effect/VFX on the regular/nonexplosive shots made them feel somewhat underpowered, though the explosive shot SFX/VFX and knockback on the enemies when they're defeated was good.

aw yes someone else thought to make a touhou plane game and it was in the same jam even

I actually haven't played many (any?) flight simulators, so learning the controls for this took a bit, but it was pretty fun to fly around once I did. Had difficulty with Marisa turning especially - I guess the idea is to start yawing left/right with A/D, roll slightly with left/right arrows to point Marisa's up axis into the center of the radius of the turn, then simultaneously/gradually pitch the nose up while continuing to yaw to execute the turn? (...now that I write it all out I have no idea how I figured that out purely by feel but it's given me a newfound appreciation for fixed-wing aircraft pilots)  VTOL flight control was also tricky (on mission 2 I missed the first goal ring and spent about 5 minutes figuring out how to back up so I could fly through it; also spent a lot of time oscillating power between 0% and 100% to find the right altitude for flying through rings) but I did crash less somehow.

That said - after figuring out the controls/clumsily making my way through the mission courses, jumping into free flight and doing low-altitude laps and sharp turns around the village and SDM buildings as Marisa felt super rewarding.

Other stuff:

• The new version is definitely easier to control - initial version feels much less sensitive and more prone to losing control/crashing (at least based on trying the Marisa tutorial there briefly).
• Hair/clothing movement was a nice touch, and helpful for indicating Marisa/Reimu's orientation and direction of movement. 

Glad to hear you're enjoying it! Currently you can farm spellcard items from the one blue fairy in the area left of the first bonfire (25% drop rate, probably will be patched in future to drop from other blue fairies).