itch.io

this has not been abandoned. i don't know when the next build will be right now.

i fell off on having a pace of updates around the holidays last year, and haven't had a good build to post since (as in, enough new/different things in it that it feels very useful to post).

a lot is currently different, but there hasn't been enough *new content* to justify it to me, as it were. currently i'm working through a side project and also needing to take a break from both due to health reasons.

im very sorry

yes, in the controller mapping menu you can switch which device it's looking at. if it shows up in the list it should work.

it's ok to join

i have a blade sight discord here - https://discord.gg/6Abd8E74CP 
it's a fairly small social discord, usually i invite people through my twitch stream chat. i don't like to have the link super visibly posted partially as a safety thing

it's not exactly a tutorial, but to get back to the opening segment you can talk to the miko at the bell shrine and ask about giving up your memories (this will reset progress)

alternatively the room can be reached again with the debug controls to go back to rm_tsuru_boss_room, i think. The instructional dialogue there mainly tells you

• use deflect (dash) to reveal weakness on enemies
• grab is used by pressing a direction (left or right) and heavy attack when very close to an enemy
• the dash's deflect window can be extended by holding down the dash button for longer
• you can burst to escape from being combo'd with light attack + heavy attack at the same time

i would like to add more weapons, and i have a few in mind, but i didn't want to work on weapons for suu until i progressed more with other aspects of the game

oh, sorry, the setting that converts up inputs into jump inputs was only applying to the digital inputs and not the analog inputs. i never noticed because i don't have an analog controller that i can test with. It will be fixed in the next build.

well

thank you for the report, i'll find what i missed

i'll see if there's anything to do with it, though none of the proposed solutions work on their own, but thank you.
if im understanding correctly the problem with red deflects is the chip damage, and that it's not visually obvious it activated? 

what does this mean?

i'm not able to make the game speed up without just changing the game frame-per-second value, which can't (as far as i know) be dynamically set. The slow-down works by freezing intervals of game frames, so there's not a process for doing this in reverse, as 'normal speed' is already at 100% frames running.

also, is there something wrong that's making you have to play a x1 screen? is the window resizing not working?

oh no, that sounds weird

my first recommendation is; have you checked the controller menu to see if the controller is selected? it's in Settings > Controls > P1 Controller Bindings. it may be that the port the game is listening to for player 1 is set to the wrong port number. if you scroll through the list it should show a name if anything is connected into a slot. (Gamemaker's controller detection is weird? there are 11 total slots, and controllers seem to sometimes just assign to arbitrary slots

if it's not there, are you using an external bluetooth dongle for the controller or just built in bluetooth? i can try and see if i can figure out why it's not able to be detected.

Also, to your first question, i do the art programming and music for the game, and i work in gamemaker studio. ty for taking a look at the game

im not sure what you mean, it should be saving game progress and state on room change. does it not resume to the last room you entered when you open the game?

the good news is i was able to replicate the crash, but only by equipping a GF, opening the dresser, tabbing over to the GF's page, exiting the menu, dismissing the GF, and then reopening it. the menu seems to remember it wants to be on the GF's tab who doesn't exist anymore, so the "Equipped!" text in the list is referencing noone "[-4] out of range [character_list]".. I don't think that's what you did since it seems to have caught you immediately, but the crash point is exactly the same, (menu draw line 111 (call entry value text); calling script line 101 (text's entry owner); calling script line 21 (fetch current char's palette)

This should be easy to patch up, I'll try and get something up tonight.

Thank you for the report!

(edit (first few were trying to attach my crash image), but the build is up now, sorry for the trouble)

sort of, using debug. there's still odds and ends to figure out with the game over checkpoints, one of which is suu's damaged alt is just tied to continues used being > 0, so it persists forever until a full reset right now (though the continue number is settable in the debug menu).

the "please rest" dialogue right now is set and not specifically triggered by being damaged or anything; though it is a reminder that suu's status doesn't fully recover after a gameover; her max health is reduced. right now the place to fix that is at a hotspring, (the vapor weather effect in the hotspring room recovers lost max health based on how deep in water a character is) but i want to add interactions with the girlfriends that do repairs as well, but my event systems need work til then

hi! in the previous build (0.2025.04.25), there are a few dialogue scenes that can play under some circumstances; spoilers (sort of?) below -- i don't know if itch allows for doing spoiler tags or anything.. this may be overly comprehensive..

- there's the first time you ask momiji to kill you it plays the scene with a cutscene graphic
- there's a chance when taking a gameover (increasing the chance with the number of continues used before giving up) for a scene to play. there are two here, one plays after the other has played before. (these are going to be moved next build since gameover event stuff is undergoing large changes)
---> the second scene of these can be played back at any time by turning on the numpad debug keys in the debug menu, and pressing numpad 7.
- there's an interaction with graphics when asking gaji to kill you (with extra dialogue if it's your final life)
- there's interactions with graphics with matsu if you keep asking her to kill you a few times
- there's also a side mission that's bugged in the current build but was accessible previously when giving up your sins at the bonfire if you do it twice in a row. 0.2025.04.25 version makes it inaccessible due to a bug with the healing items generated by the miko, it's technically accessible with debug tools in that version by warping to the rm_wisteria_tree_shrine and changing the player doll to deadnamedoll
- there's some dialogue and a scene that play when playing the hanafuda koikoi minigame with momiji if you press down to bring up the menu and select "play for keeps", however the 0.2025.04.25 and probably the version before have a crash due to a change in how gamemaker recognized the nested functions that made the portrait changes work there, this will be fixed in the next build-
- there's two versions of the same scene when completing the Don't You Remember scenario at the beginning, depending on actions taken at the final round
- there's a hidden battle if you bring the seal of continues to the Don't You Remember scenario at the beginning and you go right beyond the sealed wall
- there's an interaction with momiji to bite her if suu is at curse level 3 or higher when talking to her
- there's an interaction with kiku if she defeats suu in the ambush in the basement of the abandoned house
- there's a scene with momiji if you talk to her while in the hotspring area

there are few other smaller interactions in various places, but are either too niche or probably obvious enough to find. a lot of the scenes are sort of scattered due to the game being very unstructured and sandboxy. a lot of these scenes move around from build to build, next build being no exception due to the changes i have in for how gameover processes work

There is a bug with the current build of the game, I'm really sorry. What happens is recently-ish the item pickup effect was updated to a new animation/effect, and the miko generates healing items after purification that are on the old system which crash the game immediately.

The flashback scene and the repair scene are queued to play sometimes after a gameover, but only once, so they can't be seen again without of your save data so that it opens with the game version number again. HOWEVER for that one scene in particular, it's attached to the debug command on numpad 7; if you go to the debug settings and turn on the debug numkeys they all have various effects, with 7 being playing that scene.

I'm really sorry about the crash, that and the crash from playing strip koikoi have me wanting to get a build up sooner rather than later, but i'm currently doing some rebuilding on the gameovers/resetting/save data that i'd like to have smoothed out before posting again. I'm hoping this friday things should be stable enough

there is! if you have a girlfriend character present, pressing buttons on the P2 controls will grant control over the girlfriend character directly. It's very pop-in/pop-out friendly, so P2 tag in and out fairly freely.

There are potentially some weird interactions with the second character, it's hard to test everything. P2 shares meter with P1, gets back up automatically when getting knocked out for free (but does cause P1 to crumple when P2 gets KO'd), can use the GF button to return to P1, and has their own health bar but reduced defense. In the most recent update i was able to get targeting to work separately for the 2 characters, so they can face enemies and be targeted by enemies independently of each other.

One trouble with the system is not all characters have very complete movesets, and some characters haven't had attacks assigned inputs, but most of the available GFs through non-debug means are fairly functional

yeah, there's more work to do on the koikoi minigame, there's also some hand/deal combinations that need to pay out points immediately, but i'm sort of worried about the mention of it shutting down in high-stakes mode. 

(checked for the crash, yeah it does crash there) i'm really sorry about the crash on the koikoi game, i'll try and get a new build up at the end of this week that has that fixed, that's my fault entirely, i'm so sorry

ty!

i don't know if it's a build that's available right now, the linked gf mechanic was mostly removed and replaced with the asynchronous assists. assists are still an area i'm sort of tinkering with, though i like the asynchronous style currently. There were issues with the linked-jojo-stand style where some moves don't _work_ correctly from the gf position, functionally.

if you are interested in playing that build i can see about relisting it or reuploading it if it's been removed. i've done a lot of build updates so i prune the list from time to time to keep it readable. there are sometimes issues with save data jumping back in version number, though, so it may be a little tricky to load up if you don't know how to manage the save data.

had you played before on a previous version? this was an area that used to be connected to the map but is now disconnected so the load zone doesn't do anything. (i should probably make an actual failsafe for loadzones that don't work)

the only way to get there without debug is to have gone to the area in an older version and then loading up on the new version.

You can either take a gameover by dying or using the give up command in the menu to return to a connected area, or under Settings in the pause menu, at the bottom is the Debug Menu which includes an option to jump to any room (including some of the other disconnected rooms)

Sorry about that!

yeah

ty!,

sadly the best i have right now for a collection of artworks is probably just the media tab on my twitter https://x.com/hikari_posting/media

i'd like to get the art hosted somewhere else and had some plans for how to use some of the artwork in the game, but til then i post them to bluesky and twitter (though i'm trying to not _use_ twitter as much nowadays for reasons)

(bluesky is here hikariposting.bsky.social )

sorry

oh, yeah, i'll see what i can do with that, ty

i don't know why i never thought to look in to this, i usually strongly prefer borderless window fullscreen as well

oh, yeah, this is a bug i had encountered as well before uploading on friday,

it's related to the 'safe fall' deaths characters can do where they'll land on their feet and stay at 1hp after being defeated, feral and katana are set to use that effect, as well as kiku in the basement ambush. there's an interaction happening when a clash is the killing blow where they don't get dropped from the combat list but are no longer an enemy, so it sort of locks up; you end up winning when time counts down due to time over and actually get score again for the KO

ty for the report/video though!

hey, sorry about that, it's a weird quirk of some decisions i made with the previous build.

hp bandages go up whenever suu dies and when she continues. visiting the hotspring will recover up to half of the amount she's had maximum, so there is some amount that can't be recovered. Taking a game over doesn't do a full reset of game progress, but does zero out score, which is one of the things that prompts the 'clear' version of the bonfire cleansing. using the bonfire in that state causes the special event. to avoid it, you can make sure to kill something on the way to have a sin to give up

however! i'm also right now putting up a new build that fixes these interactions, game overs properly reset the game state again, and hp bandages work differently, though slight; hp damage is incurred when suu suffers a killing blow, and it adds up to a maximum allowed by the current curse level, and can be recovered completely at a hotspring. after a game over initially though, the bandage value starts at the default curse level's maximum value.

yeah; -heat has been a few things at various points, right now it's been hacked into being the short persistent immunity effect you after throwing someone (mainly to help throw be stronger against groups). the red afterimages effect was from heat used to be a universal install effect that had various effects that are removed right now.

-purification is a flavorful way to reset progress. i have been thinking about having checkpoints that gameovers send back to, which would clear up the purification and gameovering having the same effect

-hairpin data is the accessory tracking each sprite has a pixel marked to give x and y coordinates for the accessories to align to. this takes a long while to read the points off the sprites, so i have the game find and save all the points once on first start up, and then it re-calculates all the points if the game version number updates

yeah, tutorials in the game is something i want to do once it gets more settled.

right now there is a way to change the attack some GFs use as their assist if you press GF while sitting (it'll flash the card they have as their assist under them)

The assist system has been tricky. it's been through a lot of variation, and the linked moveset (previous iteration) had a lot of interactions that i wasn't happy with. Momiji and Matsu fit the old system very well, but the limitations made a lot of the other GFs have issues with how their moveset interacted with the linking. There is still a lot of adjustment needed for the current system, though, and the cards being missing is something that needs work. (the old system's card loading was not insignificant in how much converting needed doing)

Shizuka right now is a unique GF in that she mimics whoever she is with, though she can only be picked through debug.

a few answers to questions you have: 
- curse flowers change suu's cardback flower. this determines what weather effect is activated by a character when they use a white roman cancel (cancelling from neutral), though this is changing next build lol
- fishing catches are random, but each body of water can have different fish they can roll. if you cast while angler's 236H fireball is out, it shows a readout of possible fish. (though there is a bug in the room with angler fishing where she overwrites that effect)
- katana 214H used to be a guard cancel move. the animation i thought was too cool to scrap after the guard cancels were removed, though it can do very amusing wall-bounce corner loops against guard smashed enemies

Thank you so much for the nice words, feedback, and bug reports

coming across your videos doing one life challenges was very fun as well

next build (probably) i'll try to compile in yyc (read: should potentially run faster/better if i'm able to get the export to work),
but i'm curious to know what areas/contexts the game performance is suffering in? is it persistent, is it in specific rooms, is it during combat or specific situations in combat?
trying to narrow down what needs another pass of optimization

i'll try and see what i can do

the fishing minigame works by casting the bobber from the fishing rod into water, and then luring fish with up/down/left/right inputs. it keeps track of the average rhythm you do while luring to set the speed of the catching part of the minigame. once enough time has passed while luring, a fish will catch on the hook and cards will appear with an input to press in response, and it repeats until all the inputs have been cleared. incorrect inputs will subtract either 50 special meter or release the fish if no meter is available. the inputs can be either single buttons/directions or a motion input, like quarter-circle, half-circle, or a z-input

2 player is a bit of a mess but does ostensibly work; it has some odd interactions with targeting right now... but if player 2 is assigned controls then they are able to press an attack button and take control of the girlfriend character as an assist, moving and attacking freely. currently it doesn't change the rules for how assists work, so when they take damage they'll go on a cooldown period where they can't act. because of this 2-player mode only works while suu has a girlfriend character with her. 2player VS is something i'd like to do, but it's to do later as it's not the primary focus

thanks for the feedback!

for the enemy ai; green and red ninja and the 3 red variants of samurai are specifically a lot more passive with their ai. it was part of the work done on being able to make more specific playstyles for enemies with the goal of having some enemies act more basic or simple. green ninja specifically are set to throw ninja stars on a loose timer and rush down occasionally with no logic on how to combo it, while the red samurai variants wait until they are attacked (or enough time has passed) before they respond, with the 3 variants having different amounts of pressure they give back. whether this is fully appropriate or not remains to be seen, but the white ninja and blue samurai variants use the original ai pattern (which is the default robust routine currently). 

i'll keep this feedback in mind as i develop enemies more. there is a design space for simpler enemies to job for the harder enemies, but it may be better served by new enemy designs made for the part. the reason for the specific style they follow currently was matching to the attack pattern style present in the original jam version of the game to see if those designs could still be made with the enemy behaviour tools in the game.

(partially it may be the case that green/red ninja are fine to be very easy and passive but are also currently overused in the few encounters on offer, there's a lot to do with this topic)

the first variant for witches don't have any attacks other than the support aura currently, though they are supposed to try and exit battle if they find themselves alone, though there seems to be detection problems for it

red thread choker 1 has some code rot to it. it _does_ have audio, but is missing layers; the soundtrack fades between versions of the track depending on context, and RTC1 has only the main layer (no soft or heavy layers). the soft version plays when dialogue is running or the pause menu is active, which are the 2 ways to hear the track currently; if you speed through matsu's dialogue when it plays or play it in training and exit the training menu you'll be able to hear it. i've been needing to fix the functionality on the layered playback for tracks that only have 1 layer.

motion inputs on stick, i'm not sure; it doesn't use a separate system, and trying on a switch pro controller myself it seemed fine for the most part. so the analog sticks get read into the input system as an 8 way value, with each axis on analog needing to be over .6 to register for the direction, so it may be that it's picking up extra directions like diagonals funny and messing up the sequence. i found the double-quarter-circle super input (236236) to be a little tricky on stick sometimes

again thank you for the feedback, i _really do_ appreciate hearing that the meaner versions of the enemies are missed

controllers should be auto recognized by the game, but the way game maker reads the controllers is to assign them to one of several ports and then read inputs from that port. there is a setting in the menu under P1 Controller Remapping that allows you to set the port that is being listened to. I know the game can also be weird sometimes about controllers plugged in after the game has started up 

On this menu you should see a name pop up when it's on a controller port with some device recognized, otherwise it'll just show the number.

this makes me so happy to read, ty

bird is a quarter circle forward motion into light attack. you can cancel into it from most any other move (which is typically the case for any move that is a motion input). you'll want to start down, roll to down-forward, then forward, then press the light-attack button.

the card input that shows the move is showing a little arc along the down and forward inputs

there isn't anything in the game at the moment that gives a good rundown on how motion inputs work, sorry

sorry, i've been struggling a bit recently. some burn out and health problems, i'm behind on when i wanted to get the next update out, there's been a bunch of churn on some things and there are some things that need holes filled before it can go up. next update has another 'parry' and dash change (dash being chainable like it was before, parry having a pushback effect), heavy enemy ai changes, portraits update (mainly backend cleanup, but some redraws on some characters), and maybe save/checkpoint changes, though it depends on if i end up scrapping/pushing that back for now

the flowers are a character attribute that has some effects

and kiku can't kill yet because i haven't made the event yet, sorry, i'm really behind on a lot of things

what version are you on? is it the version with momiji's needle attacks or just her web? i couldn't get it to replicate, the hitstun stops being long enough at 18 hits (though it's certainly enough to defeat a lot of enemies)

this route with katana [5L > 5H > jump > j.L1 > j.L2 > j.H > landing > repeat...] loops, though it also becomes air-techable (combo counter is black, and you can even see the hitstun meter under ribbon's portrait doesn't even stay on screen anymore, the ai in this case doesn't try to tech at the moment making demonstrating this easy) (it  also starts itself, since j.H is what ends up launching)

there are a few attributes that decay combos (juggle height, gravity, hitstun and hitstop), not entirely to remove infinites (which i'm ostensibly fine with), i just want figuring out infinites or loops to have some friction to it. the little meter under the combo counter also shows the current decay rating.

probably! adding weapons is fun, but something i've had on the side until i've filled out some of the enemy variety and movesets first