The main problem is that the gunplay feels weak like throwing ping pong balls at enemies who do the same. In most Touhou games, the player attacks feel fast and powerful, like a gatling gun. With the sound of a machine gun when you are hitting the enemy. That’s missing here. The player also moves very slowly, which might make sense in a stealth game like Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy, but not when you're raiding a base. Cirno is an ice fairy, shouldn’t she be floating or moving in a way that feels more special? If this is more of a stealth game, Cirno should freeze cameras or enemies, float, or shrink to hide. Right now, she moves like a normal person, but she’s a fairy .W hy doesn’t she move in a more magical way? It doesn’t feel right for her to act like a human guard, it feels like a weird visual mod to another game.
Viewing post in Cirno: No Reason jam comments
All valid points, in fact you reminded me why I made the initial gun way faster at the beginning of the development, but then I eventually ended up making it slower to make the other guns feel more useful, but it might just make more sense to have the main gun be more like touhou standard weapons and shoot really fast with weak power, then add more projectiles and effects as P is collected.
About freezing: I recently implemented a bullet freezing mechanic similar to Great Fairy Wars, right now it's just a panic button but I'm thinking it can turn into something more involved in the gameplay, I still want to keep the focus on the weapons, the in-story reason is that magic does not work as well in this cyberpunk world as it does in gensokyo, Cirno's main strength is being able to come back from death as long as she has motivation.
You aren't the first person to complain about movement speed so that's definitely something that needs to change, I'm also considering eventually implementing status effects so that freezing can be something ice weapons shots do, it's just hard to not accidentally make some weapons so overpowered that there's no reason to use other weapons.
You also just gave me a great idea: Cirno could float all the time and have some friction to speed up and slow down, unless focus mode is engaged which would make the speed constant, in order to avoid bullets, this also solves the issue of having cirno face one way while she shoots another way, she can always face towards the direction she's shooting at if she floats and it will still look good