Post by PuyoPuyoTsu in Cosmic Boss Cube comments

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This is a really cool project! I love when bullet hell is used not just as a mechanic but also as an aesthetic piece, and this game does an excellent job at that–visually beautiful and great music too. The patterns are also fairly creative and pressure you in neat ways.

I do have some gripes, but they involve the later parts of the fight so I’m going to attempt to spoiler tag it here. (I haven’t used the spoiler markdown on here before, so I’m hoping it formats correctly?)

Boss spoilers

I feel like the healing mechanic has a negative effect on the pacing of the first two phases. The time between turns takes so long that you can spend several minutes trying to heal yourself back up only for all that work to be undone by just a couple hits. I beat phase 2 on my second try but the successful attempt was almost 15 minutes long which is pretty extreme--there's just not enough pattern variety to make the same attempt interesting for that amount of time. I'm not totally sure what the answer would be but if I were to play this again I imagine I'd have a better experience by just ignoring the healing entirely and cutting my losses when I get hit.

The last phase is extremely difficult (it accounted for 106 of my 108 deaths!) which I’m not inherently against, I love a solid bullet hell challenge, but the time it takes to get back into another attempt adds up incredibly quick and makes doing retries fatiguing. From the moment you run out of HP to being able to reset and get to the first pattern again, that’s over 20 seconds of downtime. Also, it’s possible that I may have missed a cue in the heat of the action, but the reversing bullets section at the end feels quite mean; there’s already some pretty tight jumps involved, so having to also memorize when to pre-emptively respond to an extra attack from off-camera feels overkill to me. Again, not sure if there was a telegraph I missed that makes it clearer when the bullets start reversing. You can kind of tell by looking behind the boss, but it’s still dicey.

Overall I had a fun time playing this.

StarDDDude159 days ago

Thanks a ton for playing and giving some feedback. The visual spectacle of patterns made up of many many bullets is one of the main reasons I like Bullet Hells, and why I usually call them Danmaku.

Oh and I finally know itchio has a spoiler markdown, that’s fantastic to know. I’ll respong to your gripes in spoiler markdown too.

Spoilery stuff

I absolutely feel you on the pacing issue. It can take a LONG time to beat and when healing the duration of attacks can get tiring towards the end. I do have some ideas that might help in this case, but i got them like yesterday a few hours before release. But I might implement them when I get around to putting in spell practice. The idea is to have the second phase start at around 70/80% of full HP, cutting down a little on the easier start of that phase. And on top maybe reducing the maximum number of sequencial attacks a bit. I might also improve the healing factor a tiny bit. Currently the damage you take is 7, while the heal is at 10. I might put it to 12-13.

I absolutely get that the retry time of the Last Spell is rather long. But I really don’t wanna shorten it further so people don’t exhaust themselves when retrying for 100 times. On games with 1-5 second retry times I sometimes see myself get frustrated from the amount of attempts I do. I don’t give myself any breathing room and just pushing buttons constantly. which is rather stressfull.

However I absolutely get that waiting those 20 seconds when you know you are still atleast 50 attempts away from a win, doesn’t help learning such elaborate patterns. To help that I wanna make a spell practice. So after reaching far enough you can decide to replay a spell as long as you want without any waiting time.

On the “True_Final_Spell_Deluxe” with the returning bullets: Yeah, there is no build-in telegraph when they’ll hit you. The idea is that you find your own telegraph. In games with this level of difficulty that’s nothing too uncommon to do. I myself used either the lasers turning on as my jumping cue, or the bullets being visible again at the edge of the screen.

Though I think the latter one isn’t as easy to discover because of all the visual clutter. I probably should remove the double stars at the start. That way there’s a clean version of the returning bullets that people can more easily practice. Those double stars don’t add anything other than visual noise and lag anyways.

To finish this, thanks for playing my game and of course congrats on beating it. I am really happy to hear that you enjoyed it and reading the feedback was very fun.

PuyoPuyoTsu158 days ago

Thanks for responding! Cool to read your insight :)

Spoilers again

I hadn't considered the long reset time from that perspective, but I do feel where you're coming from--I've definitely had moments in difficult games where I got myself stuck in a retry loop of throwing myself against the wall five times before concentrating enough to do a "real" attempt again. Having the spell practice will probably alleviate most of that. I understand wanting it to be a puzzle to figure out a reliable visual cue for the last attack too, that kind of challenge can be fun to solve!

Thanks again for the neat game!!

itch.io

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