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Flee, fairies, flee!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Use of Theme | #7 | 3.776 | 4.097 |
| Concept | #12 | 3.924 | 4.258 |
| Challenge (Tough but Fair) | #18 | 2.943 | 3.194 |
| Story/Writing | #23 | 2.081 | 2.258 |
| Overall | #25 | 3.003 | 3.258 |
| Gameplay | #26 | 2.676 | 2.903 |
| Presentation | #27 | 2.794 | 3.032 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team members
Atrufulgium
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Comments
Hard enough to have fun.
I see big potential in this one, few games use the concept of dying as the main gameplay (no, seriously, think on any (? )
As a fan of puzzles myself I found this great and multitasking, two controlls at once reminds me of marisa & alice trap tower.
A little more desing in sprites and backgrounds, less anoying tutorial signs obstructing your sight, more item interaction and you have a hell of a game!
Thanks for the advice and kind words!
Good if you are playing with a friend, not so good if you are not. The idea is really good, exploiting dead to progress is really funny, yet, moving two character using the same keyboard is kinda confusing, and is really easy to get kill in this confusion, my suggestion is to make one of the characters been controlled by the mouse somehow, so you know who is each one
I really like that mouse idea, the inputs would be so different that it would probably be easier to remember which controls which.
Maybe I should've also went with the idea of a toggleble hint under each character of which controls which, thought about it during jamming, forgot it immediately.
Thanks for the feedback!
Ah, the TWEWY of Touhou Game Jam.
So yeah, agreed on the rest of the comments about the concept. Twisting death into utilizing fire and ice elements is a nice combination of common game mechanics and it really works here as a concept. But I do really think a fair amount of the development time is mismanaged when it comes to the controls. When working with Unity it's usually recommended to tweak and obsess over your game physics until you're really happy with them. In the case of this game, the floaty momentum-gaining physics really clashed with how you had to navigate your character precisely to where you want them to live or die, especially when you're controlling two characters at once, which is a hard enough feat for the human brain on its own. I'm impressed by the number of levels you put out, but seeing as it comes at the price of these controls I think it might be best to consider quality over quantity for these complicated concepts.
It's a shame this isn't a physical on-location jam, because this would function great as a local co-op game. Maybe to circumvent a lot of those problems you could add a feature where the fairies can join and move as one unit that dies in one hit but is one thing to control, then re-split when needed. It's not perfect, but I found myself just wanting to navigate sometimes. I think Marisa had my favorite bullet spread btw, I felt I could actually strategize around it. Reimu's came in too frequently and was so direct in hitting both characters that it added too much to the equation, and Aya was Hooo boy. Marisa's came with a nice break but still had enough firepower to pose an interesting threat, and I think that's the best way to model bullet patterns for this situation.
I can tell some nice thought went into the UI, and I dig a lot of it, but on the other hand it comes with some UX nitpicks. For one thing, the sign effect is really nice and kept a nice gameflow without having to pause, but would always just be a nuisance to whatever hazard is going on and probably should've been in a safe space. This also made me miss the sign that mentions how to fast respawn the first time around, since it was at the end of the first level where the risk was high. Also the font was a bit hard to read, since the plain black text wasn't exactly popping on the detailed dark ground background. As a quick fix, adding outlines to the text tends to help that. Also God Bless for making volume settings since the music was way too loud by default (but on the other hand, the music was way too loud by default).
Anyway I really liked trying this out. Controlling two things separately is such a hard thing to work with, so this was some really great work. It was grand in scale and pretty good with the follow-through, but I think could have used a dev cycle that was more focused on the game's feel )and understanding how a player will learn these concepts) rather than having mass amounts of content. No matter how many cool ideas you get during the jam period, it's super important that the player will want to see them through when they play. Looking forward to see any future jam titles from you if you plan on it!
(oh so were all the graphics and music made by you too? Asking for ZUN Awards)
Thanks for the super detailed comment!
I gave myself only one day for all the programming, so some decisions were made a little too quickly. Especially the movement was "wait how does Unity's physics work? oh like this? ok done", and then I got used to it so ignored that issue even more.
The "merging/splitting" idea is pretty great. I did think about using ijkl as a "move both" control, but forgot about that.
I tried to go with a distinct feel for each of the characters; wanted Reimu to be managable but direct, wanted Marisa's stages to be about careful movement and misdirection, and wanted Aya to punish my up until then usual tactic of keeping the fairies close together. Perhaps I went a little overboard with some of these...
For signs (and a pause menu which I didn't get to) I actually wanted to freeze the game but my code was so spaghetti at that point (it was also late) that I just did what you see in the final product here. Not really happy with it (As if anyone can even read the sign before Level 9's finish..), and completely agree with that point.
I'm a person that always has his volume at 2% to have game volume at max, the day after I described the jam to a friend one of his first responses was "Are people going to be deaf when opening your game?", oops. Need to remember to have that slider down low next time because quite some people are the opposite. Also a SFX slider.
This was my first jam, so I didn't really know how to balance the workload at all, next time I know what to focus on more and what is less important. Great learning experience this was, so thanks for hosting!
And yes, all programming, audio, and visuals were done by me.
Idk if you'd know this already but anyway:
TIme.TimeScale = 0f;
The key to pausing in Unity. You might also need to disable some input or AI scripts since it still runs Update(), it just doesn't move anything in Unity's time (also assuming you're using Time.deltaTime for any manual non-physics movement). Then you can set things like the signs and pause menu animations to run on real time instead of Unity's time (there are ways to do that in Animators too). Then set timeScale back to 1 to unpause.
Yeah, timescale's useful. It's the "some input or AI" part I didn't feel like going through, would be like 12 different files and eventually cause 13 different bugs because I'd definitely miss something :p
Thank you!
If anyone needs help with a level, feels too frustrated by the controls, or just wants to watch instead of play, I've uploaded a full playthrough of it here
Thanks, I couldn't make it out of the first pit.
Great use of theme, but character movement feels really unwieldy, especially when you have to control 2 at once
Thanks for the feedback! By now I've realised this movement is something I've just gotten used to after hours of testing, but is indeed pretty bad. Definitely going to try to account for that next time I attempt something like this.
I hope the game still feels at least somewhat playable despite that though!
I just noticed game info doesn't get embedded on jam pages. Here's a useful part of the game's description:
Control Cirno with the arrow keys, Clownpiece with wasd, and respawn instantly using "s" or "down". When Cirno's dead, she and nearby things freeze, while Clownpiece's death sets wood ablaze.
(Because it's a game jam, there's no quality of life features like pause menus or level selects. Go to the menu by pressing escape at any time, restart the level by pressing r, and choose a level with 1-9 in the main menu.)
Known issues:
- Going back to the menu while reading a sign makes levels 4, 5, 7, and 8 stop working. To fix it, go to one of the other levels.
Cool use of theme and mechanics!
The challenge is playing this game by yourselfThe platforming feels quite floaty and slow but the otherwise the execution is very nice!
Thank you for the feedback! This is the first time I've attempted to make a platformer, so next time I'll try to make it more responsive