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.

Thank you! We'll make the graze indicators clearer in a post-jam update.

Thank you for your comments! We'll think of something for a post-jam update.

I want my own sukusuku that risks its life gathering firewood for me.

Game is definitely weird in terms of difficulty, probably due to the upgrade system. After all, you cannot entice the player with big damage upgrades unless the enemies are tanky, which is a real problem during stage 2 which is by far the hardest stage. I suspect the game might have felt a bit better to play if the upgrade trees hadn't had the damage upgrades and the enemies were better balanced around the starting damage.

Still a fun jam game, very cute art.

The game is super pretty! But a bit too easy. I literally didn't understand that I was picking towers before round 1 and only picked the Reimu tower, and I was still able to win.

Despite being easy, the game is also weirdly punishing in the early parts of the stages, where I found myself unable to do anything except watch Yoshikas mow down like 3 towers in a row due to tower building cooldowns preventing me from building anything to stop this. The talisman comes through and saves the day in this scenario, which is how I never failed a level despite not know what I'm doing.

It's so satisfying to finally get a weapon and be able to mow down some rabbits. Neat stealth game!

Maybe some parts of the levels could have been a bit more compact, but that's about the only complaint I have. The game is good.

The ending screen deserves to be enshrined as one of the greatest pieces of art that has come out of these jams.

The game itself could use some improvements. I think it's serves as a good demonstration for why basically no modern shmup has your firepower increase by 100% for each level of power. Since the enemies don't grow more powerful throughout the stage, you end up being too weak in the beginning and too strong towards the end.

It's also not great that the stage is 100% aimed bullets. Until the boss arrives, you're basically not doing any real dodging and have little sense of where your hitbox is. The boss itself is fine though.

The game could have used a score counter or kill counter or something, for replay value and for people to compare their performance with each other. Still, the art alone makes it worth playing, not only the ending art but the sprites themselves are cute enough, especially the fairy death animation.

Thanks for reminding me to stock up on rocks for Halloween.

Cute game! I got a score of 19 on my second attempt. (The first attempt was spent mostly being confused at what the fun tutorial text was meant to boil down to in practical terms.)

I spared the pyramid and couldn't seem to ever leave after that. I guess my poor villager is cursed to forever roam the halls of the pyramid...

Neat game. I did not expect 3D from  a quiz game!

Controls

• Arrow keys: Movement
• z: shoot
• x: flip shot direction horizontally
• c: charge
• shift: focus

Hi userKoishi514,

It's possible that your keyboard doesn't support n-key rollover for a sufficiently large n. See this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_rollover

The game itself can detect all of ZXC  at once.

Good high-effort jam game! It feels like just enough content for a jam game of this type and it strikes a nice balance between the boss fights and platforming, which in my experience is quite hard to do for a shorter jam (it's a lot of work to do both bosses and stages!). The dash-renewing crystals taking away momentum is a bit rude, but clearly the levels were designed around it and you get used to it. Same with the hitboxes on Alice's sine-wave attack, but the checkpoint is very forgiving and the dialog only playing once shows that the developer anticipated potentially frustrating elements and did a good job mitigating them. I think the Alice fight difficulty is just right, but it would probably have been better if the difficulty was due to something more interesting than the sine-wave wavelength and dash-distance being somewhat of a tight fit. Some of the jumps from high platforms end up being a bit of a leap of faith and this could perhaps have been mitigated by well-placed coin trails to guide the player, but the game is again very forgiving with checkpoints so it's not a major source of frustration and the player can just figure it out be experimenting. End screen:

The Okina art is amazing. There is something inherently funny about Satono and Mai ruining her evil mastermind vibe by kissing behind her back. The gameplay was kind of frustrating but I eventually cleared it. The 2 seconds spell combined with bad RNG on the previous spell can really drain your stamina even if you play well. Still not terrible; the game just takes some risk with the RNG design that maybe could have been avoided or worked out with a bit more polish.

The music is great too. I find Okina's EX theme to be really catchy and the arrange captures that well and fits the mood of the game.

Score: 4432

Super cutegame laser laser

Learning the secret trick made it much easier to maintain a combo. This is by no means a perfect or even a good run (I keep forgetting that the dive has a CD so I run into the coin), but I basically doubled my score just by using the secret trick to maintain my combo into the 100s until sadly dropping it.

Game is great fun! One of my favorites this jam for sure.

I found the game really difficulty until I realized you can just hold and drag the mouse to have a permanent wall of "cut hitbox" deployed. This made the game quite easy instead. Cute visuals and music! I agree that something like a combo counter would have made it into more of a game.

Thank you for playing! I figured the ending sequence would be divisive. Hopefully, it made the experience more memorable to you even if it FUCKs.

I'm glad the game hit successfully. It seems like you got the experience we were aiming for. Thank you for giving the game a chance and sticking with it to the very end!

I found the prayers and found them useful. But I deal zero damage to Tewi after spending what I'd consider to be a decent amount of time for a jam game and most of it spent on grinding combat. I never played Runescape, but I managed to mostly figure things out. I don't think you need a tutorial, but a more complete game page on itch.io *might* help.

One thing I never figured out how to do is to get rid of non-consumable items from my inventory. I really wish I could eat those books...

This is super cool, but what are you supposed to do? I leveled up a whole lot but the rabbit boss is still impossible and has all kind of attack types. Like, there is a ton of grinding to do but not much else?

It has a crazy amount of systems for a jam game, though, and the basic gameplay mostly feels good, although the Cirno is too slow to dodge anything so combat is merely a matter of trading hits with most foes which makes it hard to hit above your level and beat any dangerous foes.

Thank you for playing!
Any imagery that's confusing or doesn't make sense to you is likely a Salamander (1986) reference. The LGBT-themes are very subtle, but the game will teach you more if you keep playing.

3D! And it looks and sounds good.

I loved the reusing of the stages, not just as a jam tactic to make your game last longer, but playing through similar platforming challenges genuinely gives the player a sense of mastery over the game and it's quite satisfying.

That being said, the physics here is definitely a bit a weird. Like, I have no idea how to go fast, but Reisen seems to retain momentum when respawning from falling into a pit, so I used that for the longer jumps. I liked how open the level design is early on. There are things that feel like 'cheating' when you discover them in earlier weeks (like jumping on futons and vases) that I think are required for the later weeks? The puzzle aspect is nice.

Also, 2022 April 18? The concept of the exe crashing and renaming itself is interesting. How did you do it? Any hope of a linux version?

Also, switching to a different workspace permanently blacks out the screen for me (running through WINE on linux Mint). Made for a frustrating moments when I tried to figure out the controls and if there was an actual button for speeding up (I think there isn't, and the physics is just really weird with momentum retention after falling to death) and had to restart the level since I couldn't see anything.

For the record, each level took me about 10 minutes, on almost all weeks. A lot of fiddling around trying to build speed to make some of the jumps. So the game is long, but I think some more solid physics would have made it more fun to play. Not a bad game, though. One of the more interesting games this jam and I still haven't figured out the meaning of her.txt

The presentation is superb, although there is something that feels a bit disturbing about walking into bullets. It'd take some getting used to if the game was longer and more challenging. It feels basically impossible to screw up the puzzles until the final stage, where there are sections of the map where you just can't get out without getting hit. I didn't really try thinking ahead, though, since it was enough to just make sure to not walk into a bullet the next turn.

Probably could have used a limit on the number of moves you can make to force the player to think. Also, very impressive and polished look with what I assume is a limited amount of assets. I have no idea how to do non-sprite animation like this but you absolutely killed it and its a major contributor to how polished the game looks imo.

The art is so good, both in-game and for the intro/outro. I tried so hard, but in the end, it doesn't even matter?

Game could probably have used some sound effects or something to really get the players attention when a pesky witch is not being affected by the existing defenses. It feels a bit slow as well: I often found myself building Shanghai in an emergency only for the witch to already have passed the relevant squares by the time it's done (it probably doesn't help that I tend to want to build Shanghai as far right as possible to make the best us of her melee range, which makes me more prone to picking a square that the witch will have walked past by the time I'm done building). Definitely a bit of a learning curve with many restarts from me.

I also love Doll Judgement and fund myself humming along to the music. Cute game!

Controls 

• Arrow keys: Movement
• z: Laser (piercing shot)
• x: Missile (Exploding shot)
• c: Bomb (detonates an option, hold to cycle between options)
• shift: Slow movement

Scoring system

Chain weapon upgrades for score. Killing FLESH increases rank which increases the number of enemies spawned and thus the number of items dropped. Bombs refresh the weapon timer, delete bullets and give a bonus for each enemy hit by the explosion.

Other game systems

Marisa and each of her Options can only have 5 bullets on the screen at a time, which limits their rate of fire. Stay on the right side of the screen or pointblank enemies for a massive increase in firepower. Placing an Option inside of anything will obliterate it, allowing you to speedkill even tanky enemies.