itch.io

The spritework is very good. Especially for the MG, it communicates a lot of personality.

Small nitpick, the sound effect for gathering spirit flames has a pop (from starting/ending too abruptly for the AudioStreamPlayer I think). It’s the most frequent sound effect in the game, so it becomes extra noticeable.

Regarding the controls, they were intuitive (pc player) except for the attack buttons. They make sense, but like the other player mentioned, I just kept forgetting them. If we could reference them anywhere (e.g. pause menu), that would be fix enough.

(these bullet points are mostly echoing other comments, I wrote it before I read them)

• When teleported after transforming, if it happens to coincide with an enemy’s position, we take damage. If we could have a second of invulnerability after transforming, we could get our footing first. Or leaning into it, if we had an aoe blast attack only when we first transformed, it would instead become incentive to aim for the enemies to take several of them out on arrival.
• The game would freeze for several seconds on the first transformation.

I beat v1.1.3 today, and could not really notice a difference in difficulty. The witch has a glowing medallion now, is all I could tell.

By “balanced leaning on the side of easy/gentle” I meant things like the safe zones are clearly noticeable and numerous, the enemy shots come at a reasonable speed (even a little on the slow side, but fitting for our own acceleration), we’re not ambushed from off-screen (we get telegraphs for anything incoming), our weapons are effective. We can win on first tries, without having to die 10 times over to learn attack patterns. That sort of balance.
A larger hp pool on bosses still maintains all of that, so it didn’t feel like it changed.  This is all praise, by the way, not some complaint that it wasn’t made hard enough.

Rays still got me twice, on the windows build. (I know it wasn’t modified, and I’ve let the matter go, just reporting). I suppose I am simply old.

It was a fairly small issue and -eventually- simple to counter. So it could be a complete non-issue. It just stands out in being the only part that felt unfair in an otherwise well-balanced game that even leaned on the side of being easy/gentle.

acceleration part of the movement
skipping the acceleration again

This might be the key? There were moments of distraction that worked to ambush me as you designed, those are all good. But after dying to them consecutively I was actively looking for them, and still moved too slow to completely evade, getting clipped on the side. Plus, per your words, both our dodge efforts only/mostly worked when we were already moving.

Though again, mostly a non-issue, even I eventually formed a simple strategy within the game’s mechanics to get through it unharmed.

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Weighing in on the other matter you mentioned if only to expand your data pool: I had no issues with the character’s hitbox. But I rarely play games in this genre, so maybe there are some conventions that I am blind to.

Shortest example:

1. N
   
2. 20m.
   
3. 6, 2.
   
4. N
   
5. color effects
   
6. n/a

Please leave feedback in any way you like, but I would be grateful if you could also answer these prompts for me, as detailed or as briefly (even just Y/N) as you prefer. Thank you.

1. Did you beat the game?

2. If so, how long did it take? And if not, how long until you gave up?

3. Approximately how many battles did you enter? And what was the win/loss ratio?

4. Did you encounter any bugs?
(the protagonist is not an insect despite its appearance)

5. Were there any confusing or unintuitive mechanics:

• (a) even after tutorials,
• (b) even after/despite multiple interactions with said mechanic.

6. Optional: Changes you believe would improve your experience, or parts that you believe detracted from the game.

Additional questions and explanations

Some lines are just explanations. Ctrl+F for the question marks if you don't want to read all that.

1. Only took slightly more than 1 minute [to beat the game]!

Amazing.
Was it closer to 30 or 60 minutes? Or even more?

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1. Probably like 20 or 30 [battles], won like 3 of them.

A little alarming. That’s much higher than I projected (~15 as a worst case scenario). Would you lose quickly? Or on purpose? What was the win-loss record once you had a grasp on all the mechanics? What specifically would defeat you (attack speed too fast, too many attacks at once)?

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1. There was [a bug] like one time where 2 big magical orbs collided and then one just stayed stuck, not moving. Don’t recall too well.

I guess it looks a little weird, but not a bug. The speeds combine for two attacks of the same color type, so opposite directions cancel out. If anything I wanted this situation to happen fairly frequently, so they could become field hazards, ad-hoc shields and reserve bullets for the player.

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5.3.a Attacking / deflecting. Honestly thought you were supposed to just dodge stuff until the timer runs out. Very unintuitive if you don’t know it beforehand.

Violence is a choice, peace walker. But actually, I didn’t want to lead the witness/player on fighting. (Poor balancing and timing design for pacifist attempts means they have to fight or else be bored out of their minds, but that’s secondary to the point).
The pause menu has the controls, which should double as a tutorial for possible player actions. I had thought of forcing the pause menu open at the start of the first battle to enforce that tutorial, but I did not like it. Will revisit, or improve signage that the controls are in the pause screen.
(edit: controls dialog shown before first battle in update)

5.3.b It took embarassingly long to realize you’re not supposed to directly attack the girls but rather deflect orbs against them.

How long? One minute? Two battles? Half the game?
There’s a sound effect for invalid actions, like walking into a tree, walking offstage, attacking MGs. Kind of drowned out by the bgm, though.

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5.4. Magic colors. Possibly the most confusing aspect in the playthrough. Maybe I missed something, but I thought you were supposed to attack the girls with the orbs of the color they’re weak against. Imagine my suprise when they just parry it over and over again. Eventually I realized the color hierarchy really only applies to you, deflecting an orb with a weaker color just damages you and make the orb explode. The girls don’t care what color hit them as they seem to parry most attacks anyways.

There is a design flaw here but it’s not quite this.
It’s fairly standard in combat systems that a parry prevents taking damage.
The MGs parry with physical blows so they don’t take damage on a successful parry even if they’re the weaker type, because they weren’t hit. Meanwhile the player parries with magic, so they do take damage if and only when they parry with the weaker type.
When the MGs fail the parry and do take damage, they take double damage from the stronger color type. And there’s the design flaw: I didn’t want to give the girls hp bars. But then I should have given some other audiovisual cue to convey the increased damage. Instead I bet on the player ‘noticing’ the stronger colors would defeat them in, for example, 2 hits instead of 5. Shrugged it off originally because it’s just a bonus for the more observant player and neutral for everyone else*. But if it leads to player confusion on the overall system I have to change something.
(edit: added double damage feedback in update)

* = because there’s damage bonuses but no damage penalties (when magical girls get hit by the weaker color they still take full damage).

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5.5 Sealing at the end. I thought the girls would be at 3 different buildings since the response times can be different depending on the day but apparently they’re all in one place. Some were just sleeping when the alarms hit it seems. Once you know this, it kinda trivializes the final guessing by just finding the time of the day where the response times are the same.

That’s not trivializing the guess, that’s solving the objective.
The response times are different when they arrive from different places. They’re in different places at different times of the day (different schools, jobs, or homes), but all three girls share one of those locations (so the plot can happen).
In order to use your only seal effectively, you are probing when and where they’re all together. (Whether they have the same job, study at the same school or sleep in the same building) (while not knowing what the concepts of school and work are).

Question on your playthrough: did you ever attempt to seal the wrong place, or one at a time?

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1. Even knowing the mechanics, there’s still a lot of waiting around: collecting energy, waiting for the girls to arrive, waiting for them to attack. Makes for a slightly tedious experience. Perhaps there can be other sub-goals in the fights beyond getting the response times? Like collecting stuff or challenges that make the actual fights more engaging rather than just waiting out the clock. Perhaps there are already defense systems at the invasion location that you fight before the girls come. Stuff like that.

Thanks for your point of view. The waiting times were significantly reduced from the first build, so my original frame of reference was much slower and I was satisfied with the current state, not realizing it was still much too slow.

(edit: idle times reduced; removed completely on 1v1 (except first battle); fast forward now 4 times faster in update)

Was waiting for the arrivals still tedious with the fast forward button? I might swap it out out for just a time skip until an MG arrives.

I like the defense system idea. They’d have to be cannon fodder, though, lest they undermine the need for MGs.

Absolute cinema ending btw.

Story spoiler

Was it clear that she's not coming?

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Among the issues mentioned, a couple of them seemed straightforward. In that they took very little trial and error to grasp the concept.
If it’s not the case, I’d like to know in detail. I want to ask how long it took to understand the confusing points you mentioned in 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3?
In my head, they are very quickly apparent, please let me know how it impressed upon you differently.
To translate the example to your game, it would feel like adding a tutorial note to say the flower monsters in Bind kill on contact. A single attempt to move them quickly communicates that by itself.

Conversely on other parts I’ve definitely overcorrected on withholding so much information it can become barely playable, I’m aware of these too.

Additional general question: Did you use/see the overworld tutorial? And how long did you play without it, if at all? Windows or browser?

Thanks again for the in-depth feedback of the first comment, and for anything else you can spare the time to say.

Thank you for taking the time for the very detailed feedback. It’s all I’ve ever sought from joining a game jam.
I have follow-up questions, in looking for the balance of improving without overcorrecting, if you can spare some more time. Also have some explanations for some of your mentions.
But it turned out to be close to 1000 words. And that feels like imposing.

So I’ll put only my gratitude here.
And the rest in a second collapsible, ignorable comment. Purely for the record. This was already very insightful, so no pressure.

Thanks for playing.

A smooth, flowing experience.

I appreciate having zero cooldown on attacks. It was empowering.

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A small nitpick on visual design, though the impact was so small it really doesn’t matter: the only times I took damage was when I misread the enemy projectile as my own attack’s splash/burst, especially the red ones.

I can’t really tell these two apart when there’s several other things happening on screen.

If either the fireworks burst effect or the enemy attack sprite could have a different color and shape (something the player can tell apart by its silhouette without looking directly at it), it would undo this. Enemy attacks could be more bolt-shaped or spikes. Or the player’s attack could burst into stars and/or stripes.

That implementation makes sense, was just pointing it out in case the behavior was unintended.

It can feel unintuitive on the very first impression but it also immediately communicates how the power works (and how it doesn’t). It’s good.

Thanks for looking at my game, the estimated playtime to win is 1 minute 19 seconds.

This is maybe the most magical girl media I have seen.

Story spoilers

World-ending existential angst completely overturned by indomitable, (essentially-)baseless positivity (they didn't know it would work until it did).

The genre distilled into its essence. It was a joy to play the story.

The MP replenishment mechanic was innovative. Made the task an active player action rather than the typical passive interruption of waiting for it to replenish itself.

Bugs: On one game, after the first flashback scene, the classroom background remained and I could not play further. On a different play, all controls became unresponsive after unpausing. I had to restart in both instances. Finished the game with no other issues.

I read mention that the character movement speed was deliberate, in which case I would request instead that you consider extending the telegraphs for the falling sword and jumping mantas (?) a small amount. I was never able to dodge them, instead memorizing when they were due to appear and strafing the rest of the battle. This may just be my bad reflexes, though. All other projectiles and mobs moved at proportional speeds.

I liked the ending.

The game packs a lot of ambience for what seems a minimalist design at first glance.

Regarding the difficulty spike mentioned by others, I want to add the context/defense that while, yes, the complexity would suddenly ramp up, each underlying mechanic was properly introduced beforehand. We were never overwhelmed with new info or even thrown two new things at once. I do not see any flaw in the design. Though I guess a gentler difficulty curve could retain more players, which is far more important than what I think.

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Feature suggestions that I would have personally benefitted a lot from after getting stuck and needing to come back a different day:

• Level checkpoints.
• Limited-use (once per restart?) undo button.

But I understand how that second one could be seen as undermining the challenge of the puzzle.

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This may be intentional design, but:

Block C moves when I push B but block A did not despite the link.

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“Est. playtime: 10 minutes” Is this a taunt? Do you wanna fight

I had only seen similar to the graze mechanic in racing games, it translated very well to this genre.

The damage happened on every level, in almost any scenario; teleporting enemies, boss attacks, regular attacks. In trying to replicate it, I found what was happening and can describe it more accurately: It’s multiple attacks in very close proximity hitting at once, and all dealing damage. Instead of taking the first hit, becoming temp-invulnerable and respawning, I take all 3+ hits for 3+ hearts before respawning. If the teleporting speaker does its 6-shot ring attack right as it spawns in on top of me, that would be the instant kill I mentioned, taking 7 damage at once. I put a short clip in discord and pinged you.

The tutorial was in the description until I could update it into the game. It’s in both now.

I hope you were not lost for too long. Thanks for playing.

– if you still remember and can spare the time, can you list what you attempted when you did not know what to do?

To not inflict damage, you would need to dodge or block all the attacks until the magic barrier runs out of power (in 5 minutes real-time), then you can flee. (There is no special or reward in the game for doing so).

I have added a warning to the finality of using the artifact seal.

Thanks for playing.

The theme is very consistent throughout.

I do not play many games in the genre so I do not know how [un]common the mechanic is, but I really enjoy the graze system as a concept. It has such a large impact on gameplay, able to influence the entire playstyle and even the player’s frame of mind, from panic to seeing a wall of projectiles to excitement at acquiring so much charging potential.

Some notes, possibly bugs:

On the second level regular attacks disappear. Considering the boss for the area looks like the protagonist and has a mic, this seems to be intentional; but when I activate the skill, the projectiles sometimes reappear and sometimes don’t. One of the two is probably an error?

Occasionally I take multiple hearts worth of damage from one hit. Sometimes all 5 hearts. There is nothing to indicate a special attack, they seem like average collisions/hits.

In level 2 some enemies spawn in the middle of the screen and immediately die (I’m supposing they’re falling onto the stage from above?). In combination with the multiple-heart-hit bug mentioned earlier, it can cause an instant game over if the player happens to be there. If we could have a telegraph of the drop/attack, like a growing shadow one second before impact as a warning, this would work great.

I had some crashes:

• After 2nd battle I selected [Heal] (2 hearts to 3), then [Add Card] and crashed
• On a replay, again after the 2nd battle I selected [Heal] (3 hearts to 4), then [Wishes] and crashed

Windows version 1.3

Otherwise an enjoyable, complete experience. Well balanced.

The setting and polish are impressive.

But my eyes are suffering from the blur effect. I can see how it is part of the game’s theme and aesthetic, but if there cannot be a game option to disable it, please exempt the game text from the effect. My eyes kept shifting trying to focus on the suddenly blurry words.

I enjoyed how the linking timelines add a dimension to this game genre.

The animation of the character portraits looked very polished.

HP not regenerating after battle despite such a long time between said battles story-wise is odd and doesn’t feel intentional(?). Only worth mentioning since it forces a defensive playstyle and curbs experimenting, lest you lose the 2nd battle by starting at half HP.

Same as Nine, when I selected the red claw power I could no longer switch to other weapons, or use the claw itself. Windows v0.1.0. And sometimes bramble can push you inside a collider (inside a mountain/wall) and only restarting can get the player out.

The bramble power is a great mechanic. (despite the small glitch)

Playtesters finished their first runs in 15-25 minutes.

Once they understand all the mechanics, a game lasts about 5 minutes.

Confirming you figured it out. The point of the bin and other environment pieces is to check on the members’ abilities, in this case that sharks can bite through metal. I’ve fixed the bad ending text a little to make it less ambiguous. A large roster was the goal, the obstacle to it was I would also need different office layouts (without a fridge, and with some new puzzle taking its place) after boxing myself in with the food mechanic. Since for every food I add, I first need to learn via stream clips/vods how every other member would react to it.

Thanks for playing.

Thank you for the bug reports.

There’s been a patch addressing these issues.

With enough time I was going to have a journal mechanic that would “persist across timelines” and keep everything you discovered in-game (everything you asked and witnessed), so long as it was a real holomember and you didn’t knock them out. With that, one would unlock everything in about 4 passes, even with no prior hololive knowledge, and on the player’s own efforts, as opposed to simply giving away the answers. Thanks for playing.

Post-jam edit: The journal/notepad mechanic is now in the game.

Thanks for playing. Both issues sound like you’re not harvesting humans?

• Villagers leave behind their clothes when they transform into saplings. That’s when disguising becomes available.
• The main source of gathering saplings are the villagers, the meadow is supplementary help and won’t have enough of them by itself.

The pause menu ([P] and [Escape]) has tutorials for each section if anything else seems unintuitive.

Thanks for the feedback.

. When you say online didn’t work, do you mean you couldn’t find a match, or that the netcode failed? If the former, the game is very niche, the lobbies are empty, you would need to recruit your own opponent elsewhere before playing, like discord. If the latter, please give me as many details as you can (did the game hang/freeze, error in browser, browser type), thanks.

. Confirmed [copy to clipboard] is not working on the web version, thanks for the bug report.

. Both your UI suggestions were once in the game. They were changed to improve flow.

Thanks for playing. I noticed that strategy emerging in testing, so I added the smaller deck size options to counter the meta of questions. I recommend them if you find the games becoming repetitive in approach. There is a design reason the opponent’s hand is not revealed, but I see it is unsatisfying to the player. I’ll add the opponent’s card to the game over screen in an update.

Thanks for playing. 

It is a very niche game, the only way to find someone to play with would be by recruiting them elsewhere, (I am currently working on making a discord server with a looking-for-game channel/role, still in early progress).

Update: discord server is up, link in the game description.