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Yeah, it looks like a Touhou game, which is funny to me because I have never played those games but since the communities I was part of in the past really liked that game, I ended up knowing and thinking about the UI and visuals for the hitbox and stuff like those games haha

About the level, the advice I could give you is that, try to be on the side of the screen where the “rate up” power ups appear, I kind of tried to make a path with enemies that leads to the “solution” of how to beat the level, at times I put a “fake” path that usually it’s the “bomb” power up and use the bomb when the 1st sun appears so you can spam the shoot in its face until the next wave appears

I’ll try to record the gameplay once the jam is near the end, I still need to fix the delay there is each time I record my screen haha

And I also think it needs a balance, I only did the boss and level in a day and a half so that’s why it’s very hard xD

Thanks for coming to play more than once!

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Really, balancing shmups is incredibly complicated, we had a terrible balance during the first days in our game, I learned a lot about this during the jam, especially playing Touhou in a specific way (not shooting), I recommend you do that aswell, it is very interesting to see how enemies actually work there, I was surprised that none of the enemies in Touhou stayed on screen, they always left to give space for new enemies, and when we put that in our game it made a whole world of difference.

I think this was also why your game was really hard to figure out, the enemies stacked really fast and had to focus just on surviving and it was very difficult to figure out a path xD.

I see, I should try that, doing the not shooting reminds me of Ikaruga and the achievements you get by clearing the levels by only absorbing bullets

About the enemies staying, maybe I over did it haha, in some way I wanted to create “time bombs” in order to cover my lack of mid boss and make the player kill enemies and not just avoid attacks because I thought that maybe if the player just avoided, they would get bored quickly…

I wanted to do something like Darius Burst, where the enemies go through the whole screen in swarms and you have to eliminate them before it gets too overwhelming, though, in that game you have a better tool to eliminate faster the enemies that stay longer, so I should check better this :)

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Maybe that's why I died so much, I never use bombs if I can in these games, even if I'm going to die, I didn't know they were required to be used... I never played Darius Burst, so I don't know how they managed to do that, but every design comes with a solution, so maybe that game does something that tells the player to bomb or it is implicit in the design in some clever way. So yeah, you could do like I did with Touhou just trying different things to see how enemies behave and the different tools the player has. In my case, most of the balance of the game didn't come from just enemies coming and despawning, but enemy armor and a damage cap to balance the player's damage as it progress, these were things I learned directly from Touhou, but there are definitely other ways to do it.