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started streaming this tonight, got thru the bottom left / bottom center stuff and made it into top left. accidentally solved the top left bonus puzzle first out of top left stuff, which took Awhile of thinking about. This game totally whips, will play it more later but i'm all brained out right now haha

This was so pleasant c: Really well-executed, and at a very impressive "scale" for a solo dev'd game. Using the mallet was consistently very fun. If I had one negative thing to say, it would be that I wish NPC's had slightly different dialog if they were Big. Otherwise, fantastic work c: I especially really liked the chiptunes!

Also, a joke suggestion from my stream chat:
anarchistPastry: you should be able to scale up the treasure chest to give you Keys That Are Too Big and softlock yourself

Funny videogame. I loved having to change the screen size to keep up. but... My disabled wrists just can't keep at this kind of thing for too long... Well, nothing to be done about that. But I can't give it a rating, since I was physically unable to finish.

i don't know what else to say but that this is your best work yet, woah maaan. i loved acting out the dialogue on my stream, and it was all just a wonderful time all around with many good jokes and many good pokes (from the stretch snake, on to other things.) lookin forward to whatever you make next.

the only category i'm not giving 5/5 in is use of theme, because you could have at one point made a joke about stretch snake's scales, but you didn't

I liked this a lot! But in Power Scaling, when it repeats names, it doesn't have any visual indicator that it's done so, so it's way too easy to get thrown off the rhythm, especially when it happens at the same time as the pace increases. I couldn't get past 26 because it was too hard to parse what was actually being asked; it really needs to just clear the text field before starting the next one.

This is a VERY cool concept. I really like the mechanics at play. Unfortunately, the blue bullets are just too hard for me to see against the background - they really need a strong outline, and there probably also ought to be an option to fade the background. As it is, it's simply unplayable for me. Cool concept, though, and I dig the funky arrange of Seija's theme.

... I was enjoying where it was going, but when I got to level 10, I had a very difficult time seeing anything thanks to the extremely high-contrast background. When level 11 had the same background, I stopped playing, as it was simply too rough on my eyes.

I strongly dislike that there was a stated "correct answer" for everything here. It's supposed to be a game about judging, but there was no real game, only a single predetermined judgment with no room for the player to actually judge anything.

This was really cute! That said, I wish there was an easier way to swarm stuff. Having to individually click for every one of your fairy yuukmin was rather tiresome, and-- OKAY, PARTWAY THROUGH TYPING THIS CIRNO GOT TIRED OF ME JUST STANDING THERE ON THE CREDITS SCREEN AND PEACED OUT, THAT'S EXTRA POINTS FROM ME

i do! obviously the influence from other puzzle games is felt, especially handshakes, but i'm a huge puzzle game fanatic and i strongly believe you've found a vein of unmined potential by combining different types of movement restrictions. if a theoretical "full game version" had more kinds of bugs that behaved differently -- for instance, an antlion that can pull but not push, a dung beetle that pushes stuff as far as it can go every time it pushes (like a sliding ice block puzzle), or a termite that can eat a set amount of wooden "terrain" per stage, changing where stuff can go -- you could mix and match which bugs you have each stage to get a lot of different puzzles out of it. add an undo button and some control remapping for different keyboard layouts, maybe a quick intro about wriggle setting up puzzles to give her pets enrichment and putting food pellets at the end of each stage, and you're golden c:

i do not have the power in my wrists to play this game but it seems like it would be really cool. thanks for making this game even if i can't play it. not going to rate this one but it's got high numbers in spirit.

also, copy and pasted from my stream chat: 

this is what game jam games were meant to aspire towards

While it's not really my thing, the game seems to play the way you wanted it to, and I can't knock it for that. I haven't played Ikachan, so I lack context for some of it, and everyone else seems to have enjoyed it. But, I do have a few criticisms.

First off, I think it's a bit cheesy that you have an arbitrarily high amount of healing items in the final boss room. I understand that it's a game jam game, and it's hard to get the balance right in a limited time frame, but I think it would have been better if it was possible to "waste" them by picking them up at full health, so you had to be at least a little bit more careful.

Second, and more importantly, I think that the game lacks a sense of scale. That's what the game jam is themed around, and while you say that everyone was shrunk down, that isn't really communicated by any of the graphic or stage design. Could really have used some random objects for scale, or maybe a giant enemy bug...

cool idea c: i like how the different bugs having different movement restrictions added to it. you could clean this up and expand on the scope and have a nice commercial-release-worthy game!

On my first attempt, Suika just left. She just peaced out off the right side of the screen and became unhittable, then charged forward unstoppably. Didn't like that.

Hey, this was really fun! I really liked the challenge structure here. I appreciate how friendly the design is, too. There's so many points where you can make a slight mistake and it sets you up for failure, but you have a brief window to save yourself if you maintain a cool head. Really good rage game design, at a "scale" that works perfectly for the time you had to make it for the game jam. Very smartly designed. After 20 minutes or so I turned off the music and turned on my own tunes, but I can't hold that against ya. And the use of theme... Scale... yeah, I sure am scaling this mountain!!! Innovative. Fun.

People in my stream chat were saying "why does cirno not simply fly up." Stupid question. Because that's not how the sport works. Why don't people in football simply carry the ball into the goal? She's skating because it's more fun that way. As the Touhou Spell Bubble story mode establishes, Cirno is a gamer, after all.

However, even though I liked Cirno's Not So Ice Day, I do have to give the Writing category a 1/5, because you could have Written "Getting Cirnover It" as the title, and didn't

It's got some cute ideas, but. pressing a diagonal input just halting you in place is REALLY bad. Even if you can't move diagonally, it needs a priority system to maintain what you were just doing or something; just halting in place when you need to dodge something and getting hit for it feels pretty bad. And getting hit because you hit something and got meter, causing your hitbox to expand into the thing you just hit is just... misfortune.

why aren't you kirby

??? whats unfinished? i tossed birdseed and the birds arrived for it. working as advertised

hey this was slick. very good 0stRanger clone. Void Stranger was my goty 2023 so i appreciate this a lot.

I was tripped up a bit by the controls, though. My understanding is that if you hold slash, you get put into cycle of slashes for the duration you have it held, but it seems to inherit your place in the cycle from the last time, so if you just tap slash, you aren't guaranteed it'll come out, and if you hold it, the first slash will come out with somewhat inconsistent timing. This led to a lot of deaths for me. I think that if you tap the button, it should immediately do a slash, and then not abort the mode until the timer has run down to the frame of the next slash. c:

wish the bomb had some iframes. lost a run to bombing at the end when i couldn't keep up with the rapid walls, but since the walls don't die immediately, i got struck just as it was about to despawn. also, i wish that the walls popping out had a bit longer of a tell, since you often are forced to go to them.

but it's cute

Wow wow wow! This was really nice and cute c: I loved the portrait art so much!!

With that said, there were a few typos, and the dialogue felt a bit stilted in some areas. If you're planning on continuing with this, would it be okay for me to offer my assistance as a script editor?

edit: also i woulda gladly eaten the maggots. i get that protag is not a bird but i woulda happily eaten the maggots as a show of appreciation anyway

this has gotta be my favorite out of the solo dev games. thank you, aeon, for creating touhou, and also for creating me. my time out in the formless nothing is such a hazy memory, but now that i exist, it's just incredible, feeling all these feels, flapping all these bird. great work

makes you think. maybe the REAL villain, the whole time, was the person deploying nuclear weaponry for sport against the helpless birds. always who you least suspect

Wow, this was really cool! What a lovely take on the theme. A flappy bird rhythm game was not something i ever expected, but you managed to give it enough mechanics to keep it interesting! Would've loved maybe 2 more songs, but i understand now jam asset creation goes, especially in a 1-person team. Super good work! p.s. fall of fall was my favorite touhou song for many years, happy to hear it here c:

was good but bird happened :c

is there a way to change graphics settings? the shifting patterns from the harsh aliasing on distant objects is really dizzying @_@

Huh! I'm not sure how we didn't catch this in testing, but it seems like alolan crow tower dying while its laser was active would cause a scenario where, because the laser refers back to its parent object during its destructor function but the parent object more or less already doesn't exist, it accessed undefined memory and crashed the game. Thanks for bringing it to our attention! We've put up a hotfix for it c:

There is actually a description of what all the birds do on the second page of the how-to-play section! However, i suppose it's not exactly obvious that you'll be able to pull this up if you hit the pause time button. But I'm glad that you enjoyed our game anyway c:

i think there could definitely be room for better ways to display some of the info at hand, and a theoretical later version to increase scope will certainly add some things based on the feedback we've gotten. We both wanted this project to push us outside our comfort zones, and in this case it's Lily's first time making mouse-driven gameplay work, so it's a bit unrefined. However, in a version released after you played, we did expand the relevant notes in the How to Play to cover placement and hatching controls, and you're now prevented from beginning the first wave if you haven't hatched an egg, so confusion should be at least partially mitigated c:

while it would take a lot to add tooltips as things stand, the new version 1.1c does address the sound breaking issue you experienced on your stream, and greatly smooths the transitions between the song modes c:

so if you're climbing up something, you can briefly jump as you align with the next ground plane, which will stack jump impulse with your current velocity. i spent kind of awhile just finding ways to jump over all the levels. which is good! i felt like a flash game speedrunner. (aya can also fly infinitely high by alternating horizontal and vertical dashes, but after a bit gaining height that way becomes pretty slow. it is NOT speedrunning.)

game is rough around the edges but in a very charming way.

chickens (with the exception of specific breeds with modified feathers, such as silkies) are not actually flightless! they cannot soar, they can't do sustained flight, but as far as Ascending or perhaps Suddenly Being Up A Tree, they're more than capable.

SECRET ENDING.

impressed with the effort by the developer to interview real centipedes to get accurate centipede worldview and ideas for all the centipede dialogue. felt very authentic

love the art also. cute game c:

cute, but kind of rng heavy. had a run where i started too far away from an item to actually get anything, and another where it took a minute to get to the first set and then the others were too far back the other way to reach.

also, game runs at infinite fps if you don't turn vsync on, which is mean to my poor beleaguered graphics card

but still cute. i liked it conceptually and i had fun with it c:

... so, no word of what kinds of activism kutaka got up to. just, "we did some stuff, and it got better." how? it's unsaid. why is it unsaid? did you lack confidence in your ability to describe what kinds of actions you believe would produce meaningful change? it all reads as very weak. it's dismissive of revolution, but offers no kind of alternative. just a "no, that route won't work and will get a lot of people hurt, so instead i'm going to do *mystery activities* that will *help bring people together* through *interpersonal mechanisms i won't explain*. and this just works, because it would be convenient if it worked? it reads as so deeply naive. even a more charitable reading still feels like you were just afraid to say what you really wanted to say.

the comments section of this itch novel are probably not the place to get into a dissertation on my actual politics, which are strongly in favor of social anarchy, (anarchy being a philosophy that i feel most people have the wrong idea about due to being actively lied to about it by the state, who wishes everyone to believe that it's a synonym for chaos and lawlessness, when it is actually serious nonviolent political position advocating for real means for people to support their communities, offering ways to make grassroots support happen and specifically not accept the idea that any human can be above another (anarchy literally meaning "without hierarchy")), but regardless of the position you were arguing for, i would have been happier if you actually argued for it. (well thats not true. i would have been much angrier if you were pro-fascism. but if you want to go for a leftist angle then etc etc)

after picking a unit, it takes me to a grid with nothing on it and no apparent way to interact. did the server break?

hey this was some good flapmaku. loved the patterns. just nice and smooth overall. might be my favorite? i'm certainly gonna be chewing on these concepts for a bit.

had to check this out as soon as i had the energy because it was strikingly similar in concept to my own entry. it's cute! i like the music a lot. there doesn't seem to be a reason to use the lower cash towers once you can afford the higher value ones, though.

also, there's a bug where if you exit to menu and start a new run, the enemy move speed won't be reset. not a huge deal, you can reload the page/restart the program to fix it, but it's worth noting.

when painting the splash image for the game over screen, i named one of the layers "mystia sad kelly statue of liberty crying." i think anyone who has scrolled down to see the comments on this will want to know this