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.

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: