Managed to beat it on Hard on my second attempt. Stylish and expressive game as always - I also see that it uses Love 2D this time, curious what brought up the switch and how you feel about the engine so far?
I'm not sure if Hard is the intended difficulty and what's the difference between it and Easy/Normal, though overall I appreciate how much variety there was in attacks. Many of them were pretty fun to solve, there was even one (castle boss I think) where I solved it by moving up/down in rhythm with the sound effects - intended or not, I do love when several aspects of the game interact like that.
Only issue gameplay-wise was with the yellow homing bullets, especially ones shot by the gun-like boss - it didn't seem like it was possible to outrun or confuse them, they would always lock onto you precisely, and even if you try moving behind them for a sure-fire way to dodge there would usually be a few more yellow homing shots waiting for you. For that pattern I just had to eat hits (already spent all bombs on one of the previous bosses) and hope the phase ends soon.
One other thing is the tickrate of bullets, enemies and player - I'm not sure if a bug or not, but the way player/bullets moved wasn't very smooth, it was pretty easy to see when you compare those to the speed of moving background objects at the top/bottom of the screen. I got used to it eventually, but it did mess with my senses a bit.
Despite that, great work as always, congrats on making another stylish game. Thank you for sharing!
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Congratulations, hard in two tries is crazy! The difference is only numbers, but then hard and easy are night and day.
Löve2D is great. I was getting bored of JAVA for various reasons : the JRE takes too much place, the Sound and Music base libraries are super convoluted, also broadly wanted to change because my pages keep getting quarantined, and it turns out I realised, after testing the very base functions of Love and also noticing that drawing images (so essentially bullets) with an angle was easier, that it was also possible to share a browser version of a game made with Love that would likely get people less nervous to try than my downloadable versions of quarantined games.
The game was balanced on Normal but I had some time to try a bit on Hard and, while it's far beyond my skill level to fight the gun for long without getting hit, unlike the pink homing bullets the yellow homing bullets gradually decelerate and a single phase of its yellow bullets can be gone through by going back and fourth in both direction until all the bullets reach a null speed.
Synchronisation with sound effects was definitely unintended, glad you faced this cool coincidence.
Between a lack of synchronisation between refresh rate and update rate and decimal position of objects you're completely on point about the tickrates, I need to seriously check and fix that.
Thanks a lot for playing and the detailed feedback, I'm very happy you enjoyed the game!