Fun stage, I loved the transition to the bossfight with Letty starting to control the snow bullets which were already there. Also really nice art and music.
I wish Lily's movement speed was faster, but that's probably personal taste.
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Flowers in the Sky's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Music | #3 | 3.844 | 3.844 |
| Challenge | #10 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Use of Theme | #13 | 3.656 | 3.656 |
| Gameplay | #14 | 3.344 | 3.344 |
| Visuals | #16 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Overall | #18 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
| Concept | #25 | 3.406 | 3.406 |
| Story/Writing | #26 | 2.063 | 2.063 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
Ferdy, ssbbmaster, alakamande(me)
Streamable
Yes
Comments
Shoot-em-ups/STG's aren't usually my thing (ironic, I know) so I can't comment much on the gameplay, but I appreciate that dying isn't a big setback and collecting petals is a great fit for the song title. Oh, and the art and music in this are great, the ending screen is cute.
Submitted
Battlefield of the Flower Thresholdif the petals were bigger? woulda been awesome to try and survive but i took the L and used 8 continues
transition from stage to boss is pretty great and stage fairies have good patterns, albeit are a bit hard to know when they will decide to stop moving so you can shoot them
Submitted
Toss the TouhouFun little game, hitboxes are humongous though. Music is A+, love those basslines!
Submitted
Ore from the Age of GodsThis game... is so frustrating!
Everything in the game is "almost good", which in some ways is worse than being obviously bad, since I couldn't give up the idea of doing a clear without continues, at the cost of my sanity. I finally gave up after seeing the boss fight. Having had a lot of time to think about the game while playing through the early parts of the stage over and over, I'm gonna use this comment to vent my frustration.
- Everything in this game is slightly off: just right enough to make you feel as if it should be enjoyable - as if the player is the problem, and not the game. Lily's damage is just slightly too low, her unfocused speed is slightly too slow to misdirect the streams comfortably. Even the game-over menu is subtly off, using 'x' to continue instead of cancelling the run. It's the kind of psychological terror the Stasi would have devised to break down Touhou players, although I suspect it's entirely done on accident in this case.
- The game desperately needs a bomb. There are several instances where if the player dodges in the wrong direction during a seemingly symmetric pattern, fairies will suddenly spawn right behind them and start shooting clusters of aimed bullets. Bombs are the lubricant that make such trail-and-error situations non-lethal to the player. I'm not sure if a bomb was planned but cut due to the time limit, but it should have been higher priority if the goal was to recreate the feeling of a routing-heavy stage such as TH7-4.
- The life system, as implemented, is not very good. At first, I thought it was kind of cool and novel, but the lack of long-term consequences means that the player has nothing to do during the low-intensity part of the stages: it doesn't matter if I dodge badly, since I can just recover before the difficult part, and it doesn't matter if I kill and collect everything, since there are no long-term benefits to be gained. For some reason, the system made me think of the Faith system in TH10, except it's nothing like it since it caps way too easily and there is no reward for chaining things together.
- The boss is undodgeable, as far as I can tell. Unless you wanted to make a statement such as "Winter always win, the heat death of the universe will end it all", the game would have been better without Letty. (Or maybe the bullet spawn rate is tied to the refresh rate of my monitor or something? The second phase is way too dense.)
So, how should I rate this game? Since I feel quite a bit better after getting this rant off my chest, I think I'll give it a fairly high rating. In my eyes, that the game is just a few minor corrections away from being good, so I hope you're not discouraged.
Hi! Thank you for your long response to my game! Let me just start off by saying that I really appreciate your thoughtful comments. I wasn't in a good place for a while but I was finally able to make a game again after a 4 year drought. This is the first game I've truly publicly published and I was a little worried to see an essay comment but I'm really happy to read what you've wrote. The frustration you've expressed is really great, obviously it means you *want* the game to be good, and that feels good to hear.
Before I address your points, I just want to state that the core principle of the game was to recreate the rising tension of Capital City of Flowers in the Sky/PCB stage 4 with the subsequent afterglow payoff.
Alright let me address your points one by one:
> Lily's damage is just slightly too low,
I didn't have time to tune this perfectly but I definitely didn't want Lily to pop enemies as easily as in a mainline game, but it's true that it's currently frustratingly "just short" of being enough. I also designed and play-tested without shooting... because I was really focused on trying to time the bullet releases with the music. Which is definitely in part as to why shooting is so weak. But I do want to put the damage in the right spot.. perhaps in the next post jam upload...
> Her unfocused speed is slightly too slow to misdirect the streams comfortably.
This is an interesting thing to think about, having the focus speed being exactly the right speed to perform in certain specific scenarios, I wasn't exactly sure how to tune this number in the first place. I almost wish I knew which exact segments you were referring to. I found using the focus pretty naturally myself at least.
> The game desperately needs a bomb
I have... a differing, or perhaps even bad opinion of bombing that has showed itself in this game. I don't like bombing. I don't like disrupting or trivializing bullet patterns and I feel like I cheated whenever I had used a bomb. And I figured, since this was going to be a 5-minute game, I wouldn't put in bombs. Since there are unlimited continues, death is intended to be the alternative "lubricant" here. Obviously this isn't a really great choice and even a little sadistic...
> Even the game-over menu is subtly off, using 'x' to continue instead of cancelling the run. It's the kind of psychological terror the Stasi would have devised to break down Touhou players, although I suspect it's entirely done on accident in this case.
Which is why this totally made me laugh. I'm sorry for making you feel that way but worryingly, part of me feels that if it led you to create that comment it was almost worth it. Yes the 'x' to continue is actually intended to subvert the bomb button. I'm really sorry. Kind of.
> Bombs are the lubricant that make such trial-and-error situations non-lethal to the player
I think I'm beginning to understand now, perhaps you were restarting upon death rather than using continues to tour the rest of the stage(?). For whatever reason I didn't anticipate that case because I'd always play through the whole stage each time (because I was always paying a lot of attention to the music sync!). And my routing knowledge came from playing through each time and reducing my continues each time. I think I'm understanding your perspective for bombs here a lot better.
> player has nothing to do during the low-intensity part of the stages
This is an interesting thing to hear, the core principle of the game was about the building tension that is accompanied by Capital City of Flowers in the Sky + stage 4, so having nothing to do is at least, partly intentional, it's meant to be a building block of the climbing action, but I had never considered that a player could feel this way about it haha. In fact I'd already planned on adding just a tiny bit more dead time in the next update...
> it doesn't matter if I dodge badly, since I can just recover before the difficult part
It looks like you've also discovered what I discovered about my game after I had already submitted it. This is an interesting place to really consider how to implement bombs because there's no death count currently, only a continue count. So a 1cc game can be rife with misses. Even purposely using them as bombs! So much for my design.
> there is no reward for chaining things together
This is an interesting thing to think about that I had never gotten the chance to get deeper into because of the jam. The life resource, is, as everyone says an interesting idea, but it certainly left a lot of room to grow. The game doesn't have a scoring system because the reward is supposed to be the experience of the music together with the bullet patterns. Within that kind of constraint, devoid of scoring... I suppose this would be a great place to earn bombs. Perhaps the life gauge could earn you resources that you could expend 1 of to bomb and 2 if you miss, and just simply not drain anymore. Or perhaps you pay 2 to continue on a miss... I definitely would want to try implementing this if I have the time, especially if I got a cool new asset for a bomb.
> The boss is undodgeable ... second phase is way too dense
Yeah. This happens way too easily with the jam numbers + rng. The current post-jam ver. should have it tuned down a lot.
I learned a lot about creating danmaku from making this game. As well as tons of new appreciation for ZUN! I've always wanted to build my own danmaku system but in retrospect I'd say it's something better off not being done in a 3-day jam. I think reading through and responding to your response has given me new perspective and also a way to try polishing the current design if I can get around to it. Thank you for reading this all if you've made it this far and I hope if I ever make some significant changes that you might find interest in giving the game another try.
I'm glad you took my comments the right way. Of course I'd play the game again (or any future game you might make). I think the game could be made rather exciting if you just went all-in on your life system and removed the maximum cap (unlimited spring!), and maybe even killed the player if they let the meter go down to zero. Well, that's just one idea, I'm sure there are several other ways to go about it. Or Lily could be more powerful (excited!) the more spring she has, etc.
Regarding the unfocused speed being uncomfortably slow, that's clearly more of an opinion than a fact. The clearest example where I couldn't dodge in the way that was natural to me was the fairies going left->right at the bottom of the screen after the orange aimed radial patterns after the the purple lines. These fairies shot clusters of red aimed bullets, but trying to "re-stream"/"cut the stream" by making a quick motion doesn't create a very large opening here. It'd probably help in many other situations, since there are a lot of aimed clusters of bullets during the entire stage.
Have a nice day!
Okay danmaku, music is a real star here, and lives system is interesting, but Lily's damage is awful, have to follow small fries for a while to kill just one. Also I think invulnerability doesn't works well, especially after Continue - I see Lily blinking but still mortal, sometime I get hit twice by same buller
Submitted
End of DaylightI think the "getting hit twice by the same bullet" phenomenon is caused by the fact that running out of meter also causes you to die. So if you die at say, just above half meter you'll immediately die again. That being said... it seems like it might be an unnecessary mechanic now that I think about it, I might get rid of it. I'm aware of Lily's damage being low, but for whatever reason I can't find myself wanting to change it... I think I find it amusing or something. I'm glad the music stands out, I only have ssbbmaster and FerdysLab to thank for making my first danmaku come out as nicely as it has.
Very nice lives replacement and thematically fitting to Lily White too. I appreciate how easy the bullets were to see and distinguish, though the rapid spam was too much for me to deal with. The music is stellar.
Submitted
Kisume CarryMusic in this one was insane. Also: as someone who's died to Touhou 7 stage 4 several times, it was neat to recognize elements of the stage within the game.
Submitted
Touhou: Sealing Song
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