Giving some support to (what I assume to be beginners') Touhou projects! I played through all of Lunatic and Extra, both of which cleared on the first try.
Things I liked:
- The stage 1 theme
- Some of the boss spells
Some honest feedback:
- Please normalize your diagonal movement. This is one of the biggest things new shmup developers get wrong.
- Doing this wrong means diagonal movement is faster than axial movement, which makes the mechanics of dodging feel terrible.
- Concretely, that means when both X and Y keys are held down, the motion vector should not be [1, 1]. It should be the normalized version of that direction vector, [1/sqrt(2), 1/sqrt(2)]. Ask around on BHE and there'll be plenty of people to explain in further detail if you need it.
- Stages are too repetitive and drag on for too long. I lost count of the number of times the "line of fairies comes in from the side of the screen, shoots when it reaches the other side" pattern came up.
- Boss nonspells are also very repetitive. There were some creative boss spells.
- During the boss dialogue, the text appears too slowly, but pressing Z again skips the entire line. It would be nice to make a Z press while the text is appearing show the entire line, then another Z press advances to the next line.
- There are some very weird visual bugs with the health bar and remaining spells display when bombing.
- Bombing does way too much damage on bosses, allowing the skipping of most attacks, and if well timed, even multiple attacks
- Lots of the tactile feedback that mainline and notable fangames have is not in this game. For example, grazing sounds and effects (important given you have a mechanic that uses graze), sound effects for capturing a spell or ending an attack, sound effects for using the flashbomb, "charge-up" sound effects when bosses rev up for another wave, etc. These aren't just "nice-to-haves", they're things that can greatly improve the presentation of your boss fights.
- Art is MS paint art. Keep trying to improve on it!
Nice job releasing a full game and hope to see you improve further.