itch.io

Just gave it a few tries and produced a(n unlisted) superplay video:

I was hoping for no miss, but I get tagged trying to find a better shot angle on the final boss like a real dunce. I don't think this reduced my score, though.

From your description it seems like you may be done with Neon Diver, but if you want to return to shmup design one day, here are review-ish notes I've taken from my play.

Gameplay:
Neon Diver is easy, simple, and short. None of these things are bad. Simple and short is kind of a necessity for a hobby project, even.
But it's also fairly passive, which is not ideal - in my opinion, anyway. There are lots of moments in my superplay video where there's nothing for me to do because there's nothing on screen to interact with, or nothing to change about my current strategy because it's going to keep working for the next 20 seconds.

There are ways to solve this without increasing the difficulty. Take the multicolored bullet waves that I back off from in the middle of stage 2, for instance. If the player had increased firepower width and if enemies dropped pickups (even just score pickups) on death - these two things sound like they'd make the game easier, but a superplay would be forced to either swoop back and forth to collect pickups, or feather the shoot button to avoid defeating enemies when they're not directly above. As it stands, I just sit in the bottom-center of the screen with the shoot button held down instead.

You can also force the next enemy formation to come in the very moment that the previous formation is destroyed, which would remove most of the "nothing on-screen" downtime. This has little effect on players that aren't confident enough to hunt enemies down quickly like I am, but gives me more opportunities to score (or die) as I rush through more formations before the boss's scheduled spawn time.

These examples are just things from the top of my head that I've seen in other shmups (Crimzon Clover, mainly), but I'm sure there's plenty of other ways to keep the player busy without making the game too hard.

Oh, and there's no mercy invincibility on respawn, which is a little strange.


Other:
Neon Diver's main omission as far as audiovisuals go is "a sound that plays when you're hitting stuff". The orange explosion sprite stands out nicely, but it's best if I can tell when I'm shooting something without even looking.

Due to how few different bullet/enemy sprites there are, sometimes enemies surprise me by having more HP than I expect, or bullets surprise me by acting very differently from other bullets in the same attack formation (the first boss's first attack is the only example I can think of off the top of my head right now, though). Just a palette-swap would make these things a bit easier to understand.

The look and feel of Stage 4 is my favourite part of the game. The big change in music and background make it clear that it's the final stage from the moment you start, and the bullets coming in from offscreen later on is a simple and effective way to sell the feeling of "approaching an extremely dangerous weapon from afar" and also play on my nostalgia for the older Touhou games that liked to use the "bullets with no apparent enemy shooting them" kind of thing.

Finally, some bugs that I noticed:

The pause menu doesn't seem to actually let me quit, so I've just been using the top-right X to restart my runs.

The bomb button seems a bit finnicky? I've been making sure to let go of shoot and double tap it when I need something behind me destroyed. Might just be user error.

If you're aware of how to do the final phase of the final boss and go for it immediately, you can overlap the cutscenes (as demonstrated in the video)

I've already played a previous prototype that you posted elsewhere and I provided some feedback on it a while back - mainly about UI stuff. A lot of this has been addressed and it's my second time through, so the game went by pretty smoothly this time around.

The only new UI complaint: The timing schedule gets pretty crowded with all the dolls that Alice summons. It only gets bad at the very end, so whatever joke you wrote for the description of her Last Word is going to go unread. At least you can still see how long the cast time is underneath her on-map icon.

With this second playthough, I think my opinion on the gameplay has solidified: What's here would be great as the Normal difficulty of a game that has four difficulty levels.

You are given lots of resources and it's very clear where to use them. For example, in the Mokou fight there are obvious places to use Stardust (centered on Mokou), Inner Sight and Hakurei Amulet (on Youmu, to soak kicks), and Phantom Step and Shooting Star (to dodge the charge attack). Dream Barrier is unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes. All three of your health bars are unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes.

I think creating harder content by removing the extra resources (or creating a harder fight that demands their usage) would work. Maybe. It would almost turn in to a puzzle game: Sokoban-but-with-lasers. "There is precisely one delicate path of moves and attacks that will solve this encounter, and you will try things until you find it." I gave myself a taste of that by trying to beat Mokou without using Reimu at all (it is possible, I found out) - the process of iterating my strategy was fun, but I can't go through this process again, because I know what the finished strategy looks like now.

After doing that and thinking about what I would want from new and/or harder content, I realize that everything in this game is so deterministic and fair. It's nice, but a Hard or Lunatic tactics game would probably be frustrating to play in such a rigid environment. It might be fun to try some boss designs that force you to change tactics on the fly instead.

Even adding some dumb random events like "On Hard mode the boss can rarely announce a target other than Youmu and attack them once instead" or "On Hard mode, an extra summon is randomly added to the schedule" might make for more interesting play. The player has to cover multiple options and will be forced to spend health to keep things on track more often.

I'm not sure if that would be very congruous with the current design of the game ("Deterministic and fair"), but it's the direction that I think I see when I try to imagine how this game could become more fun to replay and master. Unless the plan is to stick a team-building RPG between each fight, or something. There's plenty of ways to add variance to games, depending on the kind of tactics you want to demand from the player.

Anyway, I enjoyed my playthrough of this prototype, just like the last one. I'm rooting for you.