itch.io

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

KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK AGAIN, FENNY

you knew what you wanted it to be and you didn't stress yourself by doin too much. scope was exactly correct for a one-person 3-day jam game. after playing a bunch of things that probably wanted to be too much and didn't quite succeed, it was very refreshing to see a slightly chill, very amusing little game.

10/10. oh, it's out of 5? sorry, i meant to say 10/5. good work

This has for sure been my favorite game thus far. My only complaint is that it's kind of painful to go all the way back to the start when you run out of bodies; would be nice if you could have checkpoints where you could start a section over with the bodies that you had when you got there.

Music not looping was also a bit odd, but that only ever happened when i was barely scraping by, so on my successful run it didn't even come up.

i got free grapes. gotta give the game a high rating for that. none of the other games have given me free grapes so like,,, they gotta step it up. the puzzle aspect of the game was also very nice, altho i got stuck at one point because previously i found the "wrong" solution to a puzzle and therefore didn't learn a skill i was meant to have found. but like... free grapes, so

i liked the part where being sufficiently gay lets you headshot enemy commanders through walls. true to real life in a way few war games are

it was very cute. but i wish there was a black stroke around the text. especially the red nameplates, which lacking an outline gave me a headache trying to read.

also, the lack of volume and window size settings made it very difficult to set up for streaming, especially since the sound was muted when not tabbed in, meaning that adjusting settings on the fly was extremely frustrating, especially as the game still advances muted while tabbed out. at the very least, the opening theme should have had subtitles; it was basically impossible for me to parse.

i enjoyed the writing a lot, and the scenarios were, again, quite cute, but the technical details made it very difficult for me to enjoy it through my sensory issues.

Thanks for the response! Yeah, it's intentionally a very different experience, and the changes to how garbage works are, beyond just trying to shake stuff up, primarily to give a greater deal of interaction between them and the spell cards. And if you didn't vibe with those, I can definitely see the system not clicking, especially if you're VERY used to panel de pon. 

As for the blocks being a bit noisy and especially the sound effects not conveying enough, thank you double! It's already got my brain moving on ways to improve things. We have some desire to return to this a month or so from now to generally polish it more and especially to add online play, and I'll be sure to keep that in mind.

Understandable; it was definitely possible to get overwhelmed at the start. We have now pushed an update that, among other things, should give people a lot more room to breathe in the beginning.

Excellent gameplay! I thought it was very tense, especially as the patterns are above the level that I as someone with only a few hard 1CCs can normally sight-read, but you didn't punish the player appreciably for getting hit, so it seemed like you could basically decide how you personally wanted to accept damage taken and change the difficulty based on "vibes," I guess? And I loved the way the patterns worked, and especially how much variety there was in the patterns given how little dev time there was! The writing was also quite charming, and I really appreciated the callback to the reisen sprite from kotohimebook.

Out of the jam games I've played thus far, this might be my favorite, and I expect it'll stay pretty high up there. My one complaint is probably just that I couldn't remap my controls; I'm a shift/z/x person through and through. But a and s weren't too far off, so i mostly got used to it, lol.

oh my god, and they were roommates...

and they were roommates

This was fun! Streamed it with Lily and had a good time doing it! My only issue was the lack of prediction in the input handling from the networked player; P2 seemed to stutter step around a bit, which led to a (very) small amount of confusion. But it was fun, and it seemed to be well-tuned, difficulty-wise, for its length. And I appreciated that I recognized some of the spells used by Shinki at the end from my time playing the PC-98 games c:

This was great! I thought the difficult curve was really nice, and while i personally would have appreciated a few more esoteric things to end on, (since the ending didn't require doing all the puzzles anyway,) I read other comments about not having enough time dedicated to making the content, and I fully get that, lol. The ONE ISSUE i had is just that i repeatedly walked into the path to area 1 from area 3 while sprinting around before I could see it was a stage transition, and there wasn't a quick warp back from area 1 to area 3. but that's not really a serious problem.

Immaculate vibes, and I loved how bouncy the art was.

Thank you for playing! Yeahhhh, alice benefited more than anyone else from from some global spell cooldown card buffs we did shortly before release, bringing her charge from 30 panels down to 24. We do want her to be a wall, but the endurance match aspect of her story mode fight doesn't mesh well with how much more she can drop what is probably the strongest spell card in the game. Sorry about that!

unironically 5/5 in all categories.

At first I was just thinking about how much I liked the genuineness of the aromantic/asexual representation, as someone who has been through similar situations to Kotohime's from part 1 and the early part of part 2. But, by the end, I had to take several breaks in my stream because I just couldn't stop crying. This hurt really bad. In a good way.

It's, shocking, that you say this was your first time writing something over fifteen minutes. Though, I do very much understand the situation of writing a lot without ever really showing anyone a completed work. But this, you say you tried to make it emotionally resonant, well, the 40ish people who were in my stream at the end of it all certainly seemed like none of them could stop crying either. It, ah, it was a lot, and I really think that you succeeded in all fronts. Even the little danmaku minigame had some really fun patterns to try to dodge, even tho dodging them wasn't really necessary.

I can definitely see why you needed extra time. But to me, this was far and away the strongest entry in any of the Touhou game jams I've played through, and I feel you succeeded on all fronts. I hope that you feel encouraged to write more for public consumption.

well. this isn't a ship i expected to get this invested in. this was EXTREMELY cute. i really appreciate that letty found a very letty-related alternate win condition vs yuyuko, since in this canon the playable trio couldn't do it either, But no, all the art was so soft and charming, and letty's motivation was so nice, i really liked this c: