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A jam submission

Touhou: Draconian Winter WonderlandView game page

Join reimu as she searches for the source of the never ending draconian winter wonderland affecting Gensokyo
Submitted by pickled peanuts — 1 day, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Touhou: Draconian Winter Wonderland's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Story / Writing#322.6162.960
Challenge#382.8643.240
Gameplay#412.8643.240
Visuals#442.9343.320
Overall#462.7583.120
Audio / Music#511.7321.960
Use of Theme#542.2272.520
Concept#552.4752.800

Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
Pickled Peanuts

Streaming Permission

Yes

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Comments

Submitted

Nice to see more godot shmups being made.

It's hard to pick up point items and power due to how fast they fall and due to most fairies firing a steady stream of bullets along the trajectory of the items. It's not bad, though. It adds some interesting risk vs reward and the game doesn't seem to rely on the player being powered up anyway.

Hina's spell card was pretty cool, and every attack seems to have about the right amount of HP. Cirno is too easy, but maybe there is a narrative reason for her to be anti-climactic.

Also, the file size seems to be too big for a 2D godot game of this scope. I suspect there is a whole bunch of unused assets included in the game, or that the music files are larger than they need to be. Godot will happily include unused files in the directory when you export, so I always work with my assets in a separate directory and only move the final assets into the project directory.

Developer

thanks so much for the long reply :0 I'm really happy the you enjoyed the spell cards! As much as I want to say that it was for narrative reasons, the true reason for cirnos spellcard being easy is because I was running out of time at that moment and decided to just copy one of her EoSD spell cards without altering much :<  Point items were intentionally hard to pick up as the power system is really busted and I wanted to wait until I could add a point of collection before fixing it (hint: I forgot to do that lol)

The file size is probably due to my inexperience in both gamedev and bullet hell games. Most of the assets could've been much more efficient (like the wave system, it currently operates on a animation player), so that's most likely it.

Again, thanks so much for playing and enjoying my game :>

Jam Host

You know it's quality when it's got purple Reimu

Odd detail, but I like how I could move around on the loading screen during screen transition. Pattern difficulty also felt just about right for someone my speed at shmups

Developer(+1)

thanks so much for the comment! :D purple reimu will forever be on top >:] I'm really happy you thought it was cool aswell! I'm also glad you liked the patterns as one of them (specifically Hina's), was an original design :>

(1 edit)

Short and decent horizontal SHmUP.

Slightly too easy, EXCEPT 1st boss's spellcard which is oddly tricky compared to the rest.
The stage enemy bullets "falling to the left after some time" were interesting though. I was worried this gimmick would be overused but the game's only 2 stages so that's OK.

I especially liked the dialog with the 2nd boss it's just funny

(Oh yeah also I REALLY like this sprite of Reimu flying backwards. It just looks so good especially when grazing)


Developer(+1)

Thanks so much for leaving a review :0, i agree that the first boss is quite challenging, part of it comes from it being my first try making an original spellcard, I'm currently working on a post jam version, so I'll add improvement to its design on my list :>, also, thanks for complimenting my sprite/dialogue work! I'm especially proud of the sprites since it feels like my first actually good (humanoid) sprite that I've made for a jam! Also, the difficulty is something I will look into, the hardest problem for me is that I'm not sure what the average difficulty for a touhou game is, I've played quite a bit of mountain of faith, but apart from that, I haven't played anything else. However, I do plan to do a bit more research of shmup difficulty in general (since this genre was especially fun to develop compared to others I've tried), so if you have any recommendations of touhou games (or shmups in general) that have a great difficulty curve, I'd love to check them out :). Again, thanks for checking my game out!

(1 edit)

If you're looking to research SHmUP challenge curve, in the Touhou department I think you could start with either Perfect Cherry Blossom or Double Dealing Character.
Aside from being generally agreed upon as good starting points for the Touhou series, these two games I think have a good challenge curve, AND their secondary mechanics don't heavily affect the primary core of the bullet hell aspect. (They're just a free hit/an item multiplier - VS the other games with extra gauges-abilities, or with fancy gimmicks)
I'll believe this will at least allow to better see the patterns and enemy formations in themselves first.

Now (maybe unfortunately) I'm not as well versed in other subgenres of SHmUP, these are lands I've yet to explore.
I know there's a kind that is "more active" than (relatively passively) dodging dense bullet hells. Like for example "Flying Red Barrel" which I've played 10 hours - the core gameplay instead relies on using missiles constantly to erase bullet swarms and get rid of enemies very quick. The more you combo with missiles, the more easily you can recharge your missiles.
I guess you can also turn to the classics to study what ideas they were researching in the dawn of gaming, especially how they had to make games with a limited amount of on-screen elements. In general these games would be fast (perhaps to limit the objects' screentime) and lean on reflexes a bit more than on focus. "Gradius" is what most think of when they hear "retro SHmUP".

Developer

thank you so much! I'll torally check these out :D. I'm really glad you took the time out of your day to tell me about those :>

Purple haired reimu supremacy! 

Developer

purple haired reimu will always reign supreme!

Submitted

The music being ripped straight from the canon games aside, it's a nice jam game. Always appreciate more Godot STGs! 

Hoping you find some cool replacement music for it soon.

Developer

thanks :>! Im not very good at music production, so that's why I ripped them the game. I didn't feel comfortable being rated on it however, so I selected music/SFX for the rating to remove 

Submitted

Okay, i have a lot of things to say, first of all, is not a bad game, on the contrary i liked it a lot, but is a little bit unpolished.

One thing that it lacks and is really important is a tutorial or a key explanation, like, the first thing i did when the game started was try to move with the awsd keys but i lost life trying to figure that i was supposed to move with the arrow keys, this is important because people can play the game and don't know you can do something, for example i wondered that maybe i could focus using shift like other Touhou games, and i could, but if i didn't know anything about this kind of game i would have never figured that out.

I also tried pausing the game and figured i was able to do so with the escape key, i was in the second stage and in the screen appeared two options below a "Continue?" text, so i clicked on the "Yes Yes Yes!" option but i went back into the main menu. I don't know if i was the only one with that issue but "Like hell i will!" was for continuing the game.

The power ups are busted, in the first stage i collected every one i could from the fairies and decimated Hina, like she was dead before she could shot one bullet from her spellcard (this also happened with the last boss, i think making them invulnerable while they are activating their spellcard could solve this).

One minor nitpick i have with the interface (the ui in general is pretty good) is that when you have the text at the beggining of the level telling you where you are it appears behind the objects of the game, so if i go with Reimu where the text is i can cover a little bit of it, also i can still move while in loading screen and the character is still visible.

The art of the characters could use a little bit more of work in the anatomy or proportions i think, they were nicely colored and their expressions were good (i think cirno had the best faces).

Also when you kill an enemy  they just dissapear, it would be nice to add like a particle system so it spawns white particles like an explosion when you defeat them.

Overall it was a nice game with a lot of potential.

Developer(+1)

THank you SO much for the long reply :0, I'm really happy you took the time to type all these out :>

 The tutorial was definitely something that went over my head, I'm really sorry that it was confusing to move aswell, I'll try to fix those issues in a post jam version. 

The contine text was something that I didn't even realize I left in the game, I totally scrapped the continue mechanic so I'm really sorry about that. Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention! :>

the power ups are really busted, I told myself I'd fix it but then I completely forgot about it lol. Invincibility would definitely help. But I think an entire rework on how player bullet work is probably in need

That is something I never actually noticed about the text, again, thanks for taking the time to type this out and let me know about these issues, although, the moving in the loading screen was intentional, I wanted it to feel like she was actually moving from point A to B without actually having to show any of it, by the way, do you think the loading screen is a bit long? I'm kindof conflicted whether I should keep it as is or shorten it

Thank you so much for complementing my art :D, I'm really new to drawing, so to know I only have to work on proportions makes me so happy :]

I definitely think so too, I think alot of things in my game would benefit from more particles aswell, such as bullet spawning and what not.

Once again, Thank you so much for telling me this. It makes me so happy to know that you cared enough to actively type out such a long post, it also really helps me as a game developer as I'm still relatively new to the scene and every small mistake that gets called out helps me improve. Again thank you SO much ;>

Submitted

Yeah, so regarding moving in the loading screen, is not a problem that the player can do that but more in the sense that it affects gameplay because your location changes and is not reset when you reach another level, so if you are at the right edge of the screen you will be too close to the enemies when the loading ends, it's just something to keep in mind, I don't think the loading screen is long but if you are conflicted about it you could shorten just a little bit of it. 

I'm glad my feedback helped you!

Developer(+1)

ahh, I see.. I could try warning the player about incoming enemies that the start of the stage, that could help.  Again thanks for the amount of feedback you've gave me :>

Submitted

It's a classic Danmaku type of game but in horizontal scrolling form.

The BGM is really good to listen to.

I am a terrible player in this genre so probably can't give any more details about the game.

Developer

thanks for leaving a comment :D, unfortunately I didn't make the music :<, I got it from the touhou games. Thats why the music/sound rating category is (probably/hopefully) not fillable. I wasn't comfortable getting rated on music that wasn't mine. I am very happy that you took the time to play it and comment however! :>

Submitted

I really liked the character sprites, especially Reimu's backwards movement. It's really smooth, but gives off enough feeling that you are banking backwards. I also really liked the stage backgrounds and effects like the rain and spell cards. I also really enjoyed Hina's spell, and this sort of maze like pattern you have to move about through.

Developer(+1)

thank you so much :D Im really proud of the way I animated Reimu, so I'm really happy that its not only me who found it cool :>

Submitted

I really like the character sprites, they are very cute!

Developer

thank you so much