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Fair enough regarding the tutorial bug, I should've asked what you meant rather than jumping to a conclusion.

The other tutorial bug with the enemies despawning should be an easy fix but I'll get round to that some other time, it's almost 1am where I am.

Cheers for the detailed feedback! That's a lot of bug reports, but it's better that I find them now than when the game releases! Some notes:

• The tutorial one isn't a bug. As the tutorial states, there are two different ways of beating that step: you can either kill a Shade with a Core Bomb, or kill 50 Shades. Core Bombing is a difficult technique (which is why it went undocumented in the first game), so I put in a safety net in case people couldn't pull it off and got stuck in the tutorial forever.
• I haven't been able to replicate the empty dialogue window.
• TIC-80 only has room for so much save data, so the game only saves your best score for each Prism Duel, instead of a top ten. The "High Scores" screen in the main menu shows that correctly, but the "Summary"screen doesn't (it's saying "#4" when it should say something like "here's your best for this Prism Duel"). I'll fix that.
• The two Compendium bugs are related: the entry that's supposed to unlock when you beat the demo is Twilight Snow's, but it's unlocking Twilight Haze's instead. It looks like it's also unlocking the final boss' Compendium entry, which is a massive spoiler. I'll fix both those issues.
• I've been considering shifting the player's position so they're not hidden by the dialogue boxes, and I might actually have to go do that.

I tried my best to give the Prism Warriors individual personalities and powers. There is a trans Prism Warrior, but it's not Saffron, though I can see where you're coming. You can't have a work of magical girl fiction without tonnes of queer subtext (both intentional and not)!

I might as well patch all those issues out of the demo, and then I'll patch them out of the current version of the full game as well. Thanks again for all the feedback!

You're welcome! Glad you enjoyed it so much!

Thanks! I think the one thing it's missing is some way of guaranteeing that the first tile you click on isn't a bomb, but I just ran out of tokens. I'm still very proud that I managed to cram in as much as I did.

Yeah, sorry...I just didn't have the bytes left to guarantee your first click won't be a bomb, or to reveal all adjacent spaces when you click one. I could probably sacrifice Easy difficulty to implement the first one, but I'm not sure I'd also have room for the second one.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it nonetheless! I suck at them too, in all honesty, so I wanted to try and make sure it was accessible and enjoyable for people of all skill levels while still providing challenges for bullet hell veterans.

Glad you're enjoying it! Releasing the .tic file isn't something I'd really considered but I might if there's enough demand for it.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Here on the PICO-8 website: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=37487

Can be gotten from the PICO-8 website: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=32425

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with it myself.

Sweet, good to know. I'll be looking forward to it.

The v1.1 update was released on Github a few days ago, and I've been getting alerts about it in v1.0. As someone who paid for the Pro version, when can I expect to be able to download it from here?

A while ago, I was working on a retro FPS game in Unity. Nothing came of it, but I figured it was a shame to have it sitting around gathering dust, and my solitary CrocoJam entry has been widely viewed and downloaded, so I thought perhaps people would be interested in an asset pack based on it. So I created one, and as a Christmas present to the itch.io community, I'm releasing it for free!

https://altrix-studios.itch.io/retro-fps-asset-pack

The pack contains dozens of low-poly models and low-res textures, as well as their original Crocotile 3D and Aseprite files. It's all under a Creative Commons license, so you can do pretty much anything you want with it as long as appropriate credit is given.

Depending on feedback, I'm willing to try and update the pack with extra models and textures, and/or create further low-poly asset packs. So if there's something you'd like to see, let me know!

So I kept Googling and found a slightly hacky solution to this. Just set:

poke(0x7FC3F,1,1)

This turns on some special mouse capture mode that disables the cursor. That should do the trick for me, and for anyone else who gets stuck on this problem.

Currently, my game supports keyboard inputs only. I want to support gamepad inputs as well, but as I understand it, the only way to do that is to allow all three input types. That causes the mouse cursor to appear during gameplay, and I don't want it to, because my game doesn't support mouse inputs and I don't want players to get confused about why mouse clicks aren't doing anything.

I've tried using the solution suggested here but it doesn't work for me, the cursor is still visible. Is there actually a way of turning it off, or will I have to stick to just keyboard input? Or is there a way to turn on keyboard and gamepad input but not mouse input?

It says them at the bottom of the description. Arrow keys to move, Z to jump and skip through dialogue.

Wow, this is some really detailed feedback! Thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoyed the game and took the time to write all this out. Your opinions are definitely valid, so I'll go through them one-by-one, from the top:

• I didn't realise the "game over" screen worked that way, sounds like a bug I need to fix. Thanks for letting me know.
• "Core-bombing" is something I threw in for the hell of it, thinking maybe an advanced player could get the hang of it (I too struggle to pull it off except by accident). For the sequel, I need to either refine it as a mechanic or just scrap it.
• Making the cores a different colour is something I hadn't thought of, but could be a good solution. I'll give it a try and see how it feels.
• Prism Mode is similar to Core-bombing; it's a debug feature that I threw in for accessibility purposes. You're not the first to point out that it's too easy, and it's definitely something I need to think about for the sequel.
• Life Bursts are an actual mechanic, but the window to use them is extremely small; you have to more or less anticipate getting hit and use the Burst right as the bullet lands. I agree that there's not enough feedback to tell you if you've executed one, and I'm already fixing that in the sequel. Any mention of "death bursts" is a typo that should say "Life Bursts", and something I need to fix.
• Violet's second attack has been a PITA to get right. I think I need to add some sort of hardcoded rule that guarantees there'll be a safe spot somewhere near the middle.
• In theory, any bullet that's out-of-bounds should be erased automatically. My guess wrt. Saffron's first pattern is that the bullets aren't quite going far enough out-of-bounds to trigger that, but I don't know what's happening with the ghosts in Scarlet's stage so I'll look into that.
• I'll have a look at the Burst, I know it was a bit finicky at times during development. Lua doesn't like it when you remove items from an array while iterating over it.
• I hadn't considered naming the DX-exclusive game modes, but you're absolutely right: naming and describing will probably work much better as an incentive. It probably doesn't help that even in DX, they're still locked until you get the good and bad endings. I think I'll adjust that in the next update, and edit the description with some more info.
• The Compendium completion achievement unlocking early is for backwards compatibility with older versions of the game, where there were two Compendium entries that couldn't be unlocked due to a glitch. I wanted anyone who'd encountered that glitch to be able to unlock the achievement. The glitch was fixed long ago so if it's causing confusion, I can up the requirement again.
• I'll fix Prism Indigo's Compendium entry, thanks for pointing that out.

That's a lot for me to look at, but again, thanks for such detailed, constructive feedback! I'm glad you're looking forward to the sequel and I hope I won't let you down. (BTW, not sure if you're aware but there's a one-level demo of it out already ;) )

Turns out I botched the upload, whoops! Try it now.

You're right, I've just checked and it's not loading for me either. I'm at work now, so I can't fix it just yet, but give me a few hours and I'll look into it. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Just to follow up, there was indeed a game-breaking issue with the Prism Saffron fight (and a couple of other fights). These have now been fixed as part of the v1.3.4 update and the game should be stable from this point onwards.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

- I'll have to investigate the issue with the screen going black, it's not an issue I'm aware of. If I find the glitch and push an update, I'll let you know.
- Cores getting flung away like that is actually a game mechanic, it's possible to deliberately fling them back at enemies and blow them up. I worry that the mechanic might be too confusing and I'm tempted to remove it for the sequel.
- I've had this mentioned before, and I've tried resolving it by making the bullets flash, while the cores don't. There's still probably more I can do to differentiate them, and again, it's something I'll look into for the sequel.

That's an impressive amount of detail in such a small space. Nice work!

Thanks! Dithering to black is a favoured technique of mine and I figured it made sense to use it here.

Sadly, no, I don't have illustrations of them. I'll see if I can throw together some larger-scale pixel art or something to show them in more detail.

And yes, that's intentional. The player can still be hypnotised by the final boss and get a Game Over even if they're playing in Prism Mode. Might be a bit harsh, but I didn't think if it would make sense for the hypno-bullet to do nothing.

It's Z to confirm menu choices, not Enter or Space. Sorry, I should probably mention that somewhere.

I intend to add music to the final game, though I'm not that great with TIC-80's music tracker so I may outsource it.

That pattern is indeed intentionally easy. The rest of the bosses will be harder, and you won't be able to beat them by just standing in one place like that.

Could you upload a downloadable .exe version? I really want to play this but it doesn't work in my browser :(

Dude, it's three goddamn dollars. It's not like he's selling it for the price of a AAA title. Nobody is going to spend hundreds of hours of their time recreating a game from scratch when they could just buy it for the price of a sandwich. Get over yourself.