I started off with Ultra difficulty from the very beginning, and then died on the very first enemy or so because I thought I could get away with just holding the shot button lol... It took a couple tries to get used to the slowdown, but then I managed to clear after only dying 3 or 4 times at the boss.
I liked the game - satisfying visuals, wonderful soundtrack that reminded me of One Step from Eden of all things for some reason, and the gameplay, while complicated by the slowdown mechanic, flowed pretty well after getting used to it (I do appreciate how the enemy health is on the lower side to compensate for the player's downtime on attacking). Boss fight was pretty solid and enjoyable as well, I liked how expressive it was with its movements and wiggles.
If I were to nitpick, I'd just point out a couple things:
- The gameplay during the stage portion mostly involved timing the shots properly, dodging the enemy attacks was pretty trivial as you only have to go up/down. Some of the tougher enemies had more complicated attacks, but overall I feel like the stage portion conditioned you to simple movement/attack choices while the boss required a bit more complicated decisions, which caught me by slight surprise
- The power bar, at first I thought it's some kind of special ability - I tried pressing a bunch of buttons while it was full and nothing (except accidentally activating a bomb), had to pause to check the game's page for controls again which is when I realized there is no special ability in this game... I'd see if it were possible to use a different way to show the power level or add a "power" text/icon that would clearly label it as such
Solid work overall, congrats to your team, and thank you for sharing!
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Jumping straight into Ultra like a menace, that “hold shoot and pray” strategy getting instantly punished is very on brand haha.
Really happy it clicked after a few runs and that you enjoyed the boss. Also the One Step From Eden vibes is such a sick comparison, I am sure the audio side of the team will love that one.
Yeah, the “power” bar was something we debated quite a bit internally, so it is nice to hear it made sense in the end. Unfortunately we did not have time for a proper tutorial, but given the constraints and the feedback so far it seems most people got the idea by the end of their run, which is reassuring.
Thanks a ton for playing and writing this up, and seriously, clearing Ultra with only a few deaths is kinda wild!
Ey, I'm really thankful for such a detailed feedback! To be honest, balancing the stage was already pretty difficult and with the time constraints I couldn't think of more interesting bullet patterns like the boss ones, they had to be put together and with the shrink mechanic. It pains me so many people feel conflicted by the slowdown mechanic though, I put a lot of time into tweaking the speed changes and how it worked, and believe me it was slower on a previous build.
Like Zearoh said, maybe a tutorial would've helped, but in this case, I think making a focus button rather than when shooting would've worked better, but like other things, we didn't have time to implement and test them.
It is also the first time I make a stage of a danmaku / bullet hell like this, including researching... I would love to know more about these differences to make good ones, I'm mainly playing Touhou games, but I don't see much of a difference (on the first stages, the difficulty ramp quite high after stage 3 on those).
Anyway, I've read all your feedback and it is very much appretiated, I like critical feedback because it really helps understand what people see and think of the game, the game's problems and what needs revising or improving. It really helps me grow as a developer.
Thank you for taking your time writing this and playing the game!