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A jam submission

Winter Carnival '19: 東方作品 "HOWLING COMMUNICATION"View game page

hudsonsoft-influenced caravan stg for touhou gamejam 3
Submitted by tboddy — 5 minutes, 39 seconds before the deadline
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Winter Carnival '19: 東方作品 "HOWLING COMMUNICATION"'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Challenge (Tough but Fair)#44.0294.114
Gameplay#53.8893.971
Overall#93.8893.971
Presentation#104.2254.314
Story/Writing#241.8751.914
Concept#263.0503.114
Use of Theme#272.5742.629

Ranked from 35 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team members
tb, am

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Comments

The patterns are really good and the sprites looks wonderful! Is really challenging

(1 edit)

I thought theme was 'life and death' and not 'death'. /jk Love the aesthetic. Got the music somewhere for noobs to listen to till the end? I am not very good at it, but any game that lets you go instantly back into action is satisfying.

Host

This has to be one of my favorites. And a huge improvement over last jam so A++.

This was a super well-tailored challenge with intermediate-tricky level Touhou Shmuppage. A 2 minute level rush is a great sizable-yet-significant challenge to get players on board, and keeps them pulled in by a surprising amount of unique attacks and encounters. And the juicing and game feel are soooo nice and amplifies the experience of performing better and better.

As far as nitpicks go though I really do feel like the player could've earned some kind of life/bomb like how they earn powerups. Even if they can only hold one, it would go such a long way. Especially because once you get to the boss it feels like such a significant landmark of progress and the boss itself has some pretty tough shots, so you get taken out of it a bit when you die to her. Also I wasn't super on board with the few segments that had enemies burst from the direct bottom of the screen. It's a nice idea to have segments that don't encourage players to hug the bottom, but not by offing the player randomly when they're there. Only design misstep tbh, and it's super small.

Submitted

I wish I could enjoy this but my abysmal STG skill won't allow me. It was really nice though!

Deleted 3 years ago
Developer(+1)

thanks! yep, danmaq's assets (except for .dnh files) from the original 2007 version of ctc are under the cc-by-nc 4.0 license.

Submitted

That was pretty nice! Kinda wish you didnt have to keep mashing Z to get optimal damage though, gets annoying after a while (if you hold on on it you fire in spurts, when you mash its one continuous stream)

Developer

oh wow good catch, thanks!

Looks awesome, I like the fast-paced take on Touhou gameplay.  Although as someone who's a casual fan of the shooting games, I found it hard to get past the first 30 seconds.  Difficulty ramps up pretty quick.

Developer (2 edits)

thanks so much for checking it out! i definitely agree with you, transitioning from stage design to a boss pattern while trying to balance the difficulty has always been tough for me. i'm rather inert when it comes to this part of game design, but i am enjoying figuring it out! thanks again!

Yeah, no worries.  Balancing difficulty is never an exact science, and it takes a lot of work and a lot of testing to get it right.  Obviously, it's even harder to accomplish during a game jam.

this is 10000x improved over the last jam; this feels very good and challenging to play! good job!!