itch.io

VOID SLAIN

Kind of cool. Kind of confusing but it's not so bad in practice. I think some sound effects or other in-game feedback to player action would make it more obvious when the player is doing the right thing. It's short and didn't seem very hard, but a worthwhile audiovisual experience even though it's not much of a game.

This is sick. One of the best if not the best game I've played this jam. I love how the game used the UI to signal incoming attacks from the sides. I haven't seen it done quite like that before.
Score: 835.7

Hi score: 834570

The game feels a bit slow. The stage doesn't do much and neither does the first phase of the boss, while the second phase throws in fast bullets from behind and is pretty evil. It looks great, though, and with a few tweaks I can see it being fun. The Dash->Bomb system didn't really have a chance to shine because it felt like patterns were just intentionally designed as dash bait, or didn't have any dash-able bullets at all with nothing in-between to allow for the player to actually play with the dash. There also didn't seem to be much of a point to bombing except for damage/survival, so my bomb meter was just maxed out until the last pattern, and I couldn't take advantage of the dash bait patterns to charge meter.

I like the score item x graze multiplier bonus. It's a nice little non-linearity to the scoring system.

I loved this. The art is beautiful and the game system is interesting. Very generous with resources but the final spell was no joke (at least going in blind) so I needed that.

Is there a way to see your high score? I believe I got a high 2XXXXX.

Game looks great, very interesting and unique aesthetics. The gameplay is very chaotic and doesn't strike me as particularly well designed. The stage patterns are just pure chaos. It doesn't help that the players shot blends in with the enemy shots, and that enemies can hide behind cover in such a way that you're forced to enter lines of bullets. The boss patterns are the complete opposite: very basic and static. To compensate for the chaotic stage and lack of i-frames, the player just has like 100 lives. The boss also has a lot of health and drags on, especially if you're not aiming well with your mouse.

Not a jam winner, but has some neat ideas and enemies. I really liked the purple frogs, and the final boss is similarly cool in that it chases you down. I think the other enemies needed to be more aggressive so that the patterns would stack, because the generic enemy patterns without aimed bullets do very little on their own since they aren't dense enough.

Most obvious flaw is that enemies can spawn right on top of you. It also took me a long time to figure out that the ability exists, and it's not clear if you can or cannot dodge the walls without it since the character hitbox is not very clear.I think if you wanted the player to be forced to use the ability, you should have made the basic patterns harder rather than have a specific attack that forces its use: A forced use doesn't allow for much player expression, and it also discourages the player from using against other patterns since they need to save it for the mandatory 'is ability off cooldown' check.

I wish this game was better. It looks great but there is basically nothing happening during the stage except that you have to fight the ship's very notable inertia which makes the controls feel unresponsive and makes basic movement a scary – not that there is much movement needed to complete the game. The boss also looks great and is passable for a stage 1 boss in something like Salamander.

The game froze when the boss died.

Lovely game! After playing for a long time, I got the following errors:

ERROR: Index p_shape = 0 is out of bounds (area->get_shape_count() = 0).
   at: area_set_shape_disabled (modules/godot_physics_2d/godot_physics_server_2d.cpp:354)
ERROR: Condition "p_name.is_empty()" is true.
   at: set_name (scene/main/node.cpp:1432)
ERROR: Element limit reached.

at which point my bullets no longer interacted with the environment or enemies and I had to suicide to end the game.
Gameplay wise, it sorely needed some timer or timer related bonus during the danmaku part, especially since you can stall forever by diving. In practice, most players are going to want to kill things as fast as possible anyway to keep the game progressing, so a timer would just ensure that they play this way and not super carefully. This aside, it's pretty much perfect? Great job!

Edit: after playing again, this is the score I got. I feel like the game could really really use some more teeth; Wakasagihime is way too overpowered and the game basically can't do anything UNLESS you get greedy with the pieces and end up not able to place anything. It's still really fun but it ends up taking too long.

If possible, please remove 'Not Ultrakill" (https://itch.io/jam/bullet-jam-7/rate/4564593) from my rating queue.

I contributed to the game (I'm listed under a different pseudonym) so I don't think it's fair that I rate it.

Super stylish! I'm no good with games that uses this many buttons, but I somehow got it on my second try. It's pretty awkward to jump while locking your aim. (I somehow can't clear it a 3rd time to get a time trail time on the board. Maybe I just got lucky the 2nd time?)

Glad you enjoyed it!

I saw your score post on the BHE discord and it's a good score. You definitely got what I was going for and that makes me happy.
Design wise, the game becoming unsustainably difficulty at higher levels is somewhat intended, because I don't like it when single screen games like this become a pure endurance test where the highest score is obtained by playing the longest. The idea is that most of your score will come from early levels and pushing further is a smaller optimization. (The game gets even harder at level 13. I figured it was a good cursed number. But already at level 11, your timer starts at zero.)

The scoring extends add some non-linearity to the game by letting you push further into this soft kill-screen state.

Never again

This is really hard. It feels like the game sometimes doesn't pick the right triangle but I'm sure I'm just going insane. Interesting game at least! Clear time: 2:04 and I'm never playing that again lol. Probably took me like 30 tries. At least Letty doesn't have much life.

That boss's charge attack is surprisingly tricky. It crippled my first run into the boss fight to the point where it felt pointless to continue. I can see why they died to it on stream. Not sure what makes it so hard, I think the wind-up is just kind of long and if you start moving too early you're up against the edge of the screen with not enough time to change direction. Maybe?

Also, the stage is completely impossible without holding formation and trivial if you do. I didn't realize shift did anything at first because there is no feedback from pressing it at the start of the game when you only have 1 Reimu, so I did a few tries without shift before I stumbled upon it.

There probably is a way to make the enemies be not impossibly tanky by limiting the damage they can take per seconds, rather than giving them so much health that a single Reimu can't take them out even if she shoots at them constantly. This would make more formations viable and recovery possible.

Overall fun gimmick game. Could have been slightly more than a gimmick if it kept track of score or something, but probably not much more.

Nice first game! I'm normally not good at typing games so I expected to get absolutely destroyed after seeing the players on the Touhou Station stream struggle, but it was actually not hard.

Nice game! I managed to survive 17 waves. I'm not sure if the difficulty escalated (it wasn't obvious) but I guess at some point I got bad tower RNG and got swarmed? The towers feel like they don't prioritize the right enemies generally, and the first wave was really tough and I had to basically reset there a bunch of times before I got towers that could do reasonably well and start to accumulate a crew of bouncers.

Lovely selection of characters and cute graphics. The 'kidnap' ability felt super satisfying and the description really undersold how it just removed enemies from the game.

That's a typo, it should be "Bass of this gym".

(I actually didn't realize there were more than the Normal mode stages, accessible by pressing left/right. Have not tried it!)

Incredible game. Quite hard and a bit prone to RNG with overlapping Tewi and Eirin events, but it's super cute and fun and you can definitely get the hang of it enough that you can clear it every time. Would be nice to have a mode where you can go beyond 32 to try to get a high score or something, but I was quite relieved by the time I got to the win screen since it probably took me like 10 tries or so. Congrats on winning the jam!

Greg is easier than Joel

This is really fancy for a game jam game! Got 28/30 my first try (with 1 death in stage 2). I was curious if there were different endings based on performance so I tried a 2nd playthrough but quit after a book escaped in stage 2.

Cool game! No idea which order to prioritize the scoring objectives, but at seems speedrunning at the expense of everything else isn't the key to the highest score. I did not figure out you could convert the trees on my own but had to read this page. (In hindsight it's technically covered on the title screen but small)

Cute game!

Best clear time (so far): around 11 minutes.

Favorite enemy: happy slime guys

Best girl: Mashiro!

Thank you for your comments! It's never too late.

Ideally, I would have liked to have added an 'incoming off-screen enemy indicator' like in Deathsmiles, and also some logic to mirror waves depending on the player position to avoid spawning enemies directly on top of the player. It was on my radar, but there just wasn't enough time.

Hopefully, I can make even better shmups in the future.

I couldn't really get the game to work properly. I could move her arm but not click anything, perhaps because the actual mouse position was offset compared to the arm?

I got overwhelmed once the difficulty increased. Pretty cool concept with both directions and color mattering. Might make for an interesting rhythm game if synced to the music. That being said, I'm a bit on the fence about the correct color not matching the color of the projectile: the added difficulty of the color system makes the game more difficult to pick up, but wouldn't really add any difficulty once a player has internalized the system. It basically does the opposite of what you probably want from your difficulty curve. It's not necessarily a big deal, though, it doesn't matter much for a jam game of this scope. The animation is cute and Star is precious.

I got it! Thanks. The colors seem a bit unbalanced (yellow and blue are much better than green or purple). There aren't really enough turns for me to often want to remove modifiers (it's better to just use a red thread to reroll them, when it's safe to do so). Neat concept!

I really don't know how to make games like this interesting. Obviously, the enemies would need to be stronger to compensate for the upgrades.

I was actually planning for tower upgrades to be a thing from the start

Why am I not surprised lol.

I always enjoy getting educated on arcade history by your games. Yar's Revenge, huh? 

I found stage 7 quite hard - you die very quickly until you figure out how the bullets accelerate. I think I got the hang of it on my last run. Stage 8 seems quite cool, I survived reasonably long but wasn't able to land a killing blow. How many stages are there?

Amazingly simple, insanity inducing gameplay. Great job!

Does it go on forever?

Somehow, the game stops working for me after a while. I stop being able to draw threads (swap blocks) and I have no idea why. Nothing seems to fix it.

Maybe a linux version would help?

Cool game, but I absolutely suck at planning ahead to keep my combo and I can still never go fast enough to get a good rating in Time. The 'snap back' also makes the game harder since it messes with my aim and pushes the stone further offscreen. 

Super ambitious for a jam game. I appreciate how the later levels mixed things up by blocking off spaces with mushrooms. That being said, it's pretty easy for the player to snowball out of control and the game can't do much except feebly send demons while the player is forced to watch them slowly marching to the their deaths, until a new level starts and the demons briefly have a chance to fight back. More things to spend power on would probably help, since the cooldown on building towers and lack of space is the bottleneck. Towers having upgrades seems like the obvious way to expand the game.

Still, it's a jam game, and what's there is plenty for 3 days. Also, Hecatia. <3

It was fun! Sorry if that wasn't coming through. Your games basically always display a good sense for fun danmaku and  I've come to expect solid (but a bit janky) STGs from you, to the point that I even  forgot to mention that I had fun in my comment. Really sorry about that. I'll say it once again clearly: the game is fun!

Regarding Tewi's second spell: I just replayed the game and I can see how being higher up helps. I think the balls just come out a bit fast for it too feel comfortable to be that close to the boss, but in hindsight, it's probably preferable to deal with that rather than the walls further down the screen.

Thank you for the game, and thank you for the detailed reply.

It sure is Kuru Kuru Kururin. Good job!

Nicely polished. It's interesting to see what kind of levels you can do without the springboard. I wish there was more.

Happy Halloween!

I feel like Tewi's second attack might be a bit unbalanced: I often get really walled. It's harder than anything else in the game (on Normal).

Charge attack feels too slow to be fun to use. Maybe if the player could fire while charging, but then there'd be no downside to just charging up just in case (and release before reaching 100% in case the charge was not needed). Maybe just let the player charge more quickly and balance the game around that. It also wasn't clear to me how or if the post-charge state has any scoring or survival benefits.

The top of the screen location of the charge meter confused me. I couldn't even find it at first. Swapping boss hp bar and charge bar location would be more in-line with a touhou player's expectation, but maybe you need the boss HP bar to be easily visible so the player can time boss kills for cancels?

Also, not sure about the shot customization. I spent my points in the unfocused shot to make the stage sections more fun, but then I felt tempted to dodge boss attacks unfocused and rammed into bullets as a result. Sure, it's my fault, but the customization system kind of incentivizes this and I suspect the game would be better without the ability to spec into focused or unfocused to not tempt players into min-maxing this and thus feel like they should only use half of their shot type.

I played the latest version, and I the game just ended after beating Reisen. Since jam games can sometimes be buggy, it's good to signal that the game was supposed to end there with a small 'YOU WIN' screen or something. It felt abrupt and unintended, as if the game ended mid-fight. A more obvious climax/final spell might also have helped to round the game off.

Also, Reisen's first attack comes out too quickly after her dialog, but you know this you danmaku troll.

This is an extremely aesthetically pleasing experience. Maybe more could have been done to make it more into a game (like some scoring system or time trial), but that might be beside the point. Great job!

The .pck file is missing.