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(+1)

ok but can she beat goku

way more difficult than i’m usually ready for when it comes to jam games, but that’s not at all a bad thing! incredible presentation, really fits for cirno’s big adventure. and given that it’s meant to be kinda jank and executes that perfectly, i guess that’s points for story/writing. the main theme-related part of the game seems to be the build creation, but i feel like there’s a lot of nuance to it that i just wasn’t getting. it took me a while just to figure out how to add multiple upgrades, and i had to resort to itch comments to learn about the 10-upgrade limit. and i STILL don’t know how charging works in the slightest.

as others have mentioned, visual clarity is the game’s biggest issue (at least in the jam build). projectiles are extremely fast and downright spammy at their worst, which is made significantly worse with the fact that the player shoots a huge amount of bullets as well. hitboxes were clear though, so it’s not all bad in that department! seriously that’s a MAJOR positive i hate bad hitboxes lol

fortunately, the bullet patterns were mostly fun to dodge. for the most part, the hard ones made me think “damn that’s hard i gotta lock in for this” rather than “literally what the fuck do i do here”, which tends to be a sign of well-balanced patterns. it’s also possible that some of the more baffling attacks just need better visual clarity to be learnable. as it stands, normal seems to be the most enjoyable difficulty, since lunatic (and presumably ultra which i didn’t want to try because that’s scary) turns the number of attacks that make me go “literally what the fuck do i do here” WAY up.

definitely going to revisit this one and try to practice more, and it’s a VERY good sign if i want to do that!

very cool. yea unfortunately the charge + upgrades stuff was a major miss (at least to me, both in design + gameplay). upgrades is sort of fine, but its a balancing hell and also supporting them for old + new stuff is a disaster. its still serviceable for a jam game though i think, but its definitely not very intuitive either, also mechanic overload for first play etc. 

i definitely feel like the visual clarity is a problem having taken like a week break from the matrix since the jam end though, it was not so bad to me when developing it.. i think its mainly just to the projectile colors clashing, including the player projectiles.

it is partially the design to make the player shoot a ton of bullets for some funny power fantasy type thing idk the word for it, so the player projectile count is intended.


for the design its sort of meant to lean into cave-y stuff more than touhou, granted a 3 minute game with half a day of balancing doesnt really do either justice..

that being said im glad the difficulty select is at least a moderate success, since my last couple of shmup jam games were virtually unplayable for non shmuppers.