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Thanks a lot! Yea it's a pretty rare mix from what I've seen, most bullet hell inspired run n guns are a lot more boss rushy with very short stages like Bleed 2 and stuff

Thanks for the kind words! Would be fun to go back & polish this game up some day if I'll have the time

Thank you!

Aw shit, thank you very much! Happy to hear that you had fun with this ancient game of mine

Try the nuclear option - go to %appdata% local and find the MSA thread, then delete the options/settings ini

Yea probably, "when" though is the big question...

Mark II is a small build I did for a friend - it removes inertia from dashing but also removes the slide, and removes the weapon power levels. The performance is really iffy though cause it's a quick & sloppy GMS 1.4 to GMS 2 conversion so you might get some stutters when loading in levels and what not.

Happy to hear you liked it! Yeah, it'll take a while but this game's special to me so sooner or later it's absolutely getting finished

Yes & no. No in the sense that it's on hold overall cause the artist & I are busy with other stuff, yes in the sense that I've added a lot of stuff since the demo

Word, what was it?

Thanks a ton!

It's in purgatory, both the artist & I have been busy with other stuff. Hopefully we'll pick it back up this summer but it's not 100%

Awesome! A bit late but in the latest build you can just press f1 in the main menu to reset everything

Glad you enjoyed it! Good suggestions also, parriable projectile types are probably left for an expanded ver of this demo but I can add the rest np I think. Maybe some local bullet cancels if you kill enemies with melee right as they're shooting, otherwise even the "soft sealing" thing might not do the trick

Did you try to config controls right off the bat and quit out of it accidentally? Either way, go to %localappdata%/Chaos_Devil_Battler_Zattan and delete settings.ini. Relaunching after that should work

Word

Thanks, glad you like it!

Yeah I think so! Unless GMS decides to make it needlessly difficult for whatever reason

No worries, it's slow due to work rather than any loss of interest or anything like that. Once me & the artist have more free time we'll get back to it

Happy to hear that! Development's a little bit slow this year but I'm likely going to pick the pace back up soon!

Thanks, glad you're enjoying it & found the TATE mode! Dev's chugging along at a slower pace due to work, but it's progressing nonetheless

What I mean is that the game sometimes stops drawing the player's shots mid-travel, I think the bullets themselves still run the code and everything but the sprites disappear for a while, kinda creating these weird gaps. The distance varies, and whether or not they'll appear also varies, might be an issue on my end though

Yeah I'll release an update addressing common complaints and finishing some stuff I didn't have time for with maybe some other extras. Just so I can feel like its a properly fleshed out mini game. Beyond that though Im not sure, my focus is on finishing Mechanical Star Astra atm

Glad it was helpful, and yeah that's the common problem of crit-ing game jam games, so many flaws will just come down to a lack of time

You could just name it something like "simple", "orthodox" or even "traditional" and default to cursed mode. Getting players to play the modes you want without making other modes feel illegitimate is definitely a very tricky balance

I see what you're going for (feeling like a cool ninja) and initially it kinda works but after I played a bit the mechanics fell apart. The reflects would be very cool but they are far too weak and end up being not very useful, so the dash attack dominates. Because the dash involves putting yourself in harm's way, dodging bullets (which would fit the cool ninja theme) becomes impossible and it ends up being a game about very sloppy dashing and minimizing damage. The dash attack itself doesn't have much technique to it, you point the cursor at the direction of the enemy and click without any need for careful timing. On top of that, because of how it's balanced you can reach a point where you'll have so many seconds saved up that you'll always gain more even when playing kinda poorly. In the end it's very hard to feel like a cool precise ninja when the gameplay involves dashing without a sense of timing and constantly getting hit. The dash animation/movement itself could also be cooler, but I imagine you probably didn't have the time to spice up.

If I had to spitball some suggestions, I'd suggest increasing the damage that reflected bullets do while increasing the hitbox of the player's sword slice by a lot, but at the same giving it a bit more recovery frames so the player can't safely spam it. For the dash, it'd probably help if you had some kind of charging mechanic (think Ninja Gaiden Black) to encourage more careful gameplay, while boosting the damage and giving a lot of post-dash invincibility. In general, focusing more on dodging bullets rather than minimizing damage would make the game feel cooler.

It's a shame since I imagine lots of players will see CURSED as some bonus and judge it solely on normal mode's very simplistic implementation of the 10 sec gimmick, hell I almost did that

Quite well done traditional shmup! Love the presentation & ghastly theme. The normal mode's 10 second "hyper charge" implementation was pretty lackluster since it takes forever and goes against the caravan-y mechanics, but CURSED mode is a lot more interesting and should have probably been the main feature despite how strict and punishing it is. The only complaints I have are pretty small like the very slow movement speed, those tiny green bullets that are needlessly difficult to see/track and the nasty swords coming from behind with no warning. Very impressive & fun overall

Multiple explosions that cover up are the way to go IMO, they always feel quite good.

I think the enemy hitboxes being so small is the problem, you wanna separate the enemy body hurtboxes and hitboxes, making the hitboxes small while keeping the hurtboxes quite large, this is the best of both worlds.

Enemy wave design is tough yeah especially on a time limit since you don't exactly have the time to do a shit ton of playtesting to make sure it flows great, but well that toaplan left to right to left pattern never fails

Yeah they should be bright but that's not the only thing, right now a lot of enemies aren't too much bigger than bullets or random debris, and the colors themselves don't stand out TOO much from the bg. During normal gameplay it's not a big issue but once you get a huge loadout and start seeing bullets ricocheting all over the place, or are focusing your eyes on boss attacks it can be very easy to miss enemies. I'm not sure there's a very clean solution to this besides maybe something sloppy looking like outlines/auras, or redoing enemy designs to make them bulkier so they're more clearly visible in the heat of the action. Nex Machina is probably a good reference since it's a very visually busy game that has no problems with visibility.

Regarding the loadouts, I'm spitballing but maybe make the player lose upgrades one at a time instead of all at once if the time limit runs out, while lowering the extra time gain from picking up extra upgrades? Potentially that could add more pressure & challenge forcing the player to be smarter about timing pickups, without being overly punishing. Being overpowered is cool, but I feel like it's good to make the player work to sustain that OP state a bit

Thanks! And yeah that was planned but you know, jam time limits. I'll give your game a try in a bit!

My worry with a health bar is that it'll make people think that surviving 10 days is the focus of the game, missing the coin collection system. But yeah the central issue of not having a reason to collect the coins needs to be addressed in SOME ways

Fun stuff, the way the segments are cut up and the transitions between them are very satisfying though I feel like you could lean into quick killing stuff a bit more. The boss attacks being split into 10 second chunks was very fun too. Surprisingly high amount of polished content. The only two gripes are that the weapons felt half baked and just amounted to a DPS difference and that the player shots themselves always felt extremely weak in terms of presentation (DPS was balanced fine I think) cause of how tiny and thin they were, and the weird disappearance of bullets sometimes. Music's catchy as fuck

Yeah I understand why you gave them iframes, but the ambiguity makes it very frustrating. Having the enemies jump out of the background (being greyed out until they're hittable) would be the best choice in this case. The jumping felt finnicky specifically because of either the movement's inertia, or the way the jump works (it has a preset timer/arc after you release the button maybe?), the exact problem is hard to pinpoint but basically it felt like I would often slide on landing, removing a sense of control. A lot of that is psychological, but important.

This is great! Feels good to play overall (though perhaps some enemies are too spongy) and the theme is very cleverly implemented. I love how the sneeze goes from a liability to an actual offensive move once you learn to control it, very nice! Only complaint is the post-sneeze shooting delay which feels very awkward, besides that it's really well done

Pretty decent shmup with awesome visuals & nice music. Mechanically it does feel a bit too barebones, definitely missing an on screen shot limit and some kinda bomb mechanic, but overall it's a fun time. I have some gripes about game feel (lack of bullet impact splash sprites, enemy/player shot hitboxes feel too small, player shots feel a bit small, explosions barely cover enemy sprites) and level design (there doesn't seem much of a flow to how the enemies spawn and attack, maybe I need to play more and get in the right rhythm tho) but I'm sure most if not all of that comes from the jam deadline

As a child you fear Red Falcon's army of robots and aliens, as an adult you realize that the IRS is a far more fearsome threat.

The theme's great but I found the gameplay needlessly frustrating. The platforming was unpleasantly finnicky because of the friction, the shooting was unpleasantly finnicky because of the arc of your projectiles, the jumping enemies had a frustrating invincibility period, and many of the enemy attacks came at such awkward angles that dodging them with finesse is pretty much impossible. It's mostly quite easy to fix though

A lot of fun and very impressive amount of content/polish for a jam game! Stacking power ups until they melt bosses (and the framerate) is quite satisfying. A bunch of gripes though :
The dashing is far too powerful, it has no cooldown and, as far as I can tell, too many iframes while the basic movement is too ineffective. The inertia makes precise tap dodging feel clunky, while the top speed is too low to really give a good sense of control.
The enemy designs don't mix too well with the graphics and constantly get lost among all the other clutter, the power ups look too small also.
Besides that, the difficulty (and fun) difference between not having upgrades and having a lot is far too insane, and what's more keeping the upgrade stack refilled never felt like a challenge so once you get a bit of momentum going you reach god mode. The hit detection on a bucnh of the enemy attacks also felt very off (sword boss for example) but I imagine both of these gripes are the results of not having enough time.

Also despite the gripes being dominant in my comment, the overwhelming impression and rating are very very positive!

Glad you had fun! The repetition/lack of BASIC challenge is a big issue that I definitely wanna address in an update, very recurring

Very stupid in a very good way, made me smile while playing. Impressive amount of scenarios and work put into the visuals considering how little time you had. The gameplay itself is very janky though and a lot of the threats aren't telegraphed at all leading to an unpleasant kind of trial & error which also kinda defeats the punch the game has since redoing parts makes them lose their humor and highlights the game mechanics which are lacking.