itch.io

1. Only took slightly more than 1 minute [to beat the game]!

Amazing.
Was it closer to 30 or 60 minutes? Or even more?

1. Probably like 20 or 30 [battles], won like 3 of them.

A little alarming. That’s much higher than I projected (~15 as a worst case scenario). Would you lose quickly? Or on purpose? What was the win-loss record once you had a grasp on all the mechanics? What specifically would defeat you (attack speed too fast, too many attacks at once)?

1. There was [a bug] like one time where 2 big magical orbs collided and then one just stayed stuck, not moving. Don’t recall too well.

I guess it looks a little weird, but not a bug. The speeds combine for two attacks of the same color type, so opposite directions cancel out. If anything I wanted this situation to happen fairly frequently, so they could become field hazards, ad-hoc shields and reserve bullets for the player.

5.3.a Attacking / deflecting. Honestly thought you were supposed to just dodge stuff until the timer runs out. Very unintuitive if you don’t know it beforehand.

Violence is a choice, peace walker. But actually, I didn’t want to lead the witness/player on fighting. (Poor balancing and timing design for pacifist attempts means they have to fight or else be bored out of their minds, but that’s secondary to the point).
The pause menu has the controls, which should double as a tutorial for possible player actions. I had thought of forcing the pause menu open at the start of the first battle to enforce that tutorial, but I did not like it. Will revisit, or improve signage that the controls are in the pause screen.
(edit: controls dialog shown before first battle in update)

5.3.b It took embarassingly long to realize you’re not supposed to directly attack the girls but rather deflect orbs against them.

How long? One minute? Two battles? Half the game?
There’s a sound effect for invalid actions, like walking into a tree, walking offstage, attacking MGs. Kind of drowned out by the bgm, though.

5.4. Magic colors. Possibly the most confusing aspect in the playthrough. Maybe I missed something, but I thought you were supposed to attack the girls with the orbs of the color they’re weak against. Imagine my suprise when they just parry it over and over again. Eventually I realized the color hierarchy really only applies to you, deflecting an orb with a weaker color just damages you and make the orb explode. The girls don’t care what color hit them as they seem to parry most attacks anyways.

There is a design flaw here but it’s not quite this.
It’s fairly standard in combat systems that a parry prevents taking damage.
The MGs parry with physical blows so they don’t take damage on a successful parry even if they’re the weaker type, because they weren’t hit. Meanwhile the player parries with magic, so they do take damage if and only when they parry with the weaker type.
When the MGs fail the parry and do take damage, they take double damage from the stronger color type. And there’s the design flaw: I didn’t want to give the girls hp bars. But then I should have given some other audiovisual cue to convey the increased damage. Instead I bet on the player ‘noticing’ the stronger colors would defeat them in, for example, 2 hits instead of 5. Shrugged it off originally because it’s just a bonus for the more observant player and neutral for everyone else*. But if it leads to player confusion on the overall system I have to change something.
(edit: added double damage feedback in update)

* = because there’s damage bonuses but no damage penalties (when magical girls get hit by the weaker color they still take full damage).

5.5 Sealing at the end. I thought the girls would be at 3 different buildings since the response times can be different depending on the day but apparently they’re all in one place. Some were just sleeping when the alarms hit it seems. Once you know this, it kinda trivializes the final guessing by just finding the time of the day where the response times are the same.

That’s not trivializing the guess, that’s solving the objective.
The response times are different when they arrive from different places. They’re in different places at different times of the day (different schools, jobs, or homes), but all three girls share one of those locations (so the plot can happen).
In order to use your only seal effectively, you are probing when and where they’re all together. (Whether they have the same job, study at the same school or sleep in the same building) (while not knowing what the concepts of school and work are).

Question on your playthrough: did you ever attempt to seal the wrong place, or one at a time?

1. Even knowing the mechanics, there’s still a lot of waiting around: collecting energy, waiting for the girls to arrive, waiting for them to attack. Makes for a slightly tedious experience. Perhaps there can be other sub-goals in the fights beyond getting the response times? Like collecting stuff or challenges that make the actual fights more engaging rather than just waiting out the clock. Perhaps there are already defense systems at the invasion location that you fight before the girls come. Stuff like that.

Thanks for your point of view. The waiting times were significantly reduced from the first build, so my original frame of reference was much slower and I was satisfied with the current state, not realizing it was still much too slow.

(edit: idle times reduced; removed completely on 1v1 (except first battle); fast forward now 4 times faster in update)

Was waiting for the arrivals still tedious with the fast forward button? I might swap it out out for just a time skip until an MG arrives.

I like the defense system idea. They’d have to be cannon fodder, though, lest they undermine the need for MGs.

Absolute cinema ending btw.

Among the issues mentioned, a couple of them seemed straightforward. In that they took very little trial and error to grasp the concept.
If it’s not the case, I’d like to know in detail. I want to ask how long it took to understand the confusing points you mentioned in 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3?
In my head, they are very quickly apparent, please let me know how it impressed upon you differently.
To translate the example to your game, it would feel like adding a tutorial note to say the flower monsters in Bind kill on contact. A single attempt to move them quickly communicates that by itself.

Conversely on other parts I’ve definitely overcorrected on withholding so much information it can become barely playable, I’m aware of these too.

Additional general question: Did you use/see the overworld tutorial? And how long did you play without it, if at all? Windows or browser?

Thanks again for the in-depth feedback of the first comment, and for anything else you can spare the time to say.