itch.io

Glad you were able to run it even though it was slow. I plan to introduce settings for turning down vfx as it consumes the most of CPU/GPU power.

>You've effectively captured some of the soul of early Touhou games, good job! Only thing that really felt off was when bullets moved as I moved, that didn't seem intuitive.

There is going to be a lot more variety of patterns and experimentation, so some mightn't be clear during the first run which I plan to compensate with a sort of restarting system from the point of loosing the last life but at the cost of having the score to be zero or something.

Thanks for trying it out!

> The menus are frustrating to navigate. Why is there a custom mouse cursor if nothing can be clicked?

The mouse issue will be fixed somewhere in the future.

> The boss music against Anna felt like it was blowing out my eardrums. I have my OS volume set to much lower than it was playing.

Thank you for the feedback. I will try to experiment with setting a proper volume for the music, so it won't kill your ears.

> So, the way I got into the game was selecting constellations and then the first option, but the first time I tried it had a phantom dialogue cutscene playing over the game. Like I was moving around and enemies were firing at me but the text box, Lily, and the vampire were blocking most of the view.
Also, I have no idea if constellations were the right way to play lmao. I just selected stuff and shit happened.

So, the dialogue can be hidden / shown by pressing 'D'. If you got into the main gameloop via pressing a bunch of 'enters' then it worked as intended. Constellations are just highlighted by default if one wants to customise the spells. These three boxes, achievements, profile name, constellations, are navigated by using UP/DOWN arrows and by pressing 'E'. Pressing 'enter' results in the same behaviour as clicking on the LOAD button, i.e. it goes to the difficulty selection.

Thank for trying to check it out! The issue might be related to missing libraries. You probably just need to install the library lib32-sdl2_mixer and other similar, e.g. lib32-sdl2_ttf, lib32-sdl2_image, and / or the same libraries without prefix 'lib32-'.

There is also a windows version which you can try to run in wine as it contains necessary SDL libraries with itself.

It might be actually a good idea. I'll probably make a sort of limitations of how many restarts there are going to be but I'll see.

Thank for trying it out and for the feedback!

> Gameplay wise, seems to be missing some default stuff that the touhou games have, like displaying your hitbox when you are in focus mode (holding shift to slow down), and an indicator of the boss position, at the bottom of the screen.

At the moment, I don't plan to having show the player hitbox as well as indicators for positions at all.

> I think the bullet hell, gameplay part is good, and it's just missing a couple of things, that I've pointed out above.

Glad to hear that!

> The main problem in my opinion right now is everything before the gameplay. The menus have too much stuff, and feel all over the place.

This is for having some variety for customisation for the player, though it is quite basic for now.

> Wierd word choices. Why does it says LOAD instead of start? What's up with the LOAD PROFILE thing? It all feels very unintuitive to me. The Catatonia, Revelation etc. is the dificulty choice?

It used to be START / NEXT but at some point I replaced it with LOAD and kept it. The wording might be changed to an extend as you suggested. And yes, these are the difficulty choices.

> You have a good bullet hell game here, but I think the menus need a rework.

Thank you! The menu will undergo some slight improvements, e.g. having more decorations and better visuals for navigation.

Thank you for playing the game and for the feedback!

> -Mouse hotspot is bellow my cursor by ~line height. I think it's due to my screen being 16:10, and the game is pillarboxed to 16:9.

> -Why no fullscreen toggle? It will force go to my 16:10 instead of the 16:9, so I can't test my theory(without changing Windows display settings.)

The game is made only for 16:9 for now. I removed the toggle because it caused a crash in wine, even though it works on linux. The issue with the cursor will be fixed at some point in the future.

> -I already have a profile? Is this a dev profile you forgot to remove?

I have included a profile in order not to go through the motions of unlocking the spells and to test them immediately.

> -The menu buttons will highlight, but it seems like if my mouse is between two of them, there is a void where pressing click won't do anything, despite the apparent focus. Specifically between 'Load profile' and 'Hall of fame'.

Noted.

> -Selection indicator in the ACTI(DEMO) screen after loading profile is bad. It's just drawing a 2nd outline of the same color and texture, which is barely  visible. [later] oh you do this for most of the submenus, yeah it's really bad.

Thank you for making a gif! Yes, for now this serves as a default selector. I made some improvements for the buttons in the profile customisation and settings, so they at least differ in colour when being selected / hovered over.

> -Started playing the game after checking out the submenus, I regret not checking the controls.

There is no tutorial at the moment but I plan to make a sort of introduction in the prologue.

> -Got to the vampire(which talks about God for some reason?). The writing feels a little under par, frankly. The boss itself is not great for a first time. The gimmick of bullets suddenly changing trajectory is annoying, and unfair. If they at least slowed down then accelerated, it would be much better than turning on the spot. And, the patterns didn't feel that great, subjectively. Anyways, I died, oops.

The order of encounters is subject to change. I'll think about the sudden change of trajectory, some patterns have it already included but others don't. I will also consider different and somewhat more interesting patterns. (Glad you haven't played the first demo xd).

> -Looking at the controls, interesting. You apparently have actual spells you can use. I go back to profile, and now there's a second profile. Does it create one every time you die? Or did I accidentally do that.

It creates one time only because the "dev" profile is sort of locked. If you go again into that profile, you will see that your progress doesn't affect it and only saved in your version of that profile.

> -Portals A and B look identical. Cmon, you seen Portal, just make them look different like red and blue or whatever. Looking closely in the pause screen, it seems like one rotates clockwise and the other counterclockwise. That is way too subtle for a game like this.

The portal mechanics even with different colours is not simple as the players tend to mess up the shortcuts and die as a result. I will try to experiment with different palettes and such.

> -I pressed D and suddenly a phantom dialogue shows up? I mean in game, I just took the pic while paused. That said, D also does it while paused. Weird

> -Oh I think I know why D does that, it's to hide the dialogue while in cutscene. Unintended consequences. And I notice that time runs up when in the conversation, that's a bit silly. Also, I don't think there's a way to skip so you have to hammer enter. nvm holding works.

Yes, this is intended for hiding the dialogues during cutscenes. There is actually an option in the settings to toggle skipping dialogues.

> -Died to the boss again, no continues is kind of annoying bruv, not all of us are touhou masters.

What do you mean no continues? You mean like to continue from the phase you died? But I still plan to make the first difficulty easier and somehow keep it interesting with patterns.

> -Beat boss 3rd time.

Congrats!

> -Skeleton dude pops up dialogue, but it's right after a wave that drops items and score, so I got distracted and the drops were halfway down the screen before I started chasing them.

This is why I have added a shortcut for hiding the dialogue initially.

> -I attack skeleton, all is well. Then he jumps into me way too fast and I die on contact damage. Ehh, I don't like that type of thing especially in bullet hells. There's already a 1000 ways to die dangit. Boss is alright otherwise.

Hmm, as far as I know he just moves around. I guess you got onto his movement path.

> -I am skipping around now, I don't fell like beating all the bosses. So far, it feels too annoying to use portals. I feel like it would be better maybe if you used the portal with spacebar, so you can use them without compromising your other fingers. Also, the third spell is just useless? It does the same damage as lightning, to bosses at least, it's narrower, and doesn't autoaim.

I plan to have a customisation of keyboard shortcuts rather than forcing whatever it is at the moment. The third spell is supposed to be a bit more powerful but it seemed I didn't fix it and left it to have the same damage output as other spells.

> -I can't change weapon while a dialogue is up, which is a bit odd.

During the dialogue stage, the spells are supposed to be not even being shown.

> -Sophia boss is whatever, knight is neat since it forces use of the portals. Though, the first pattern is a bit brutal since with so many bullets outside of it, you could still teleport then they run into you from behind. Guess I'm done.

The  priestess has the same set of spells from the previous demo just with a different rotation and it also became based on the difficulty level. The hunter is supposed to be more advanced in terms of difficulty as the progress goes on. Glad, you have tried to beat all the bosses!

> I don't like the story stuff, it's a bit disturbing and not funny. Albeit, the idea of a clueless main character is a decent device. Good luck with the rest of development.

The story tells itself, so I try to minimise meddling with it as much as I can in order to persevere the original prima materia.

Thank you! Good luck with your game too!

Thank you for playing it and for the suggestions! I have watched the video and it was interesting. You seemed to be good at the game for the highest difficulty levels xd Still, I think I'll turn down the difficulty of the easy mode.

I tried on Linux, got a missing library error:

./rex_operari_demo62: error while loading shared libraries: libGLEW.so.2.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Hmm that's weird. I am in the process of switching to OpenGL from SDL and there are still some issues left but this might be due some missing libraries which is an easy fix (though not sure on which part, yours or mine). If not, then it's hard to tell what it is.

So I played the windows version. Outside of the menu issues, it worked perfectly until the end. I noticed, however, that when you start the program it spawns a terminal window. You might already know this, but you can hide the terminal by using the "-Wl,-subsystem,windows" flag in gcc, or an equivalent of it.

Thank you for mentioning that! I am compiling with mingW-gcc and had only "-Wl" flag out of these two for now and didn't notice the terminal in wine with virtual environment being enabled.

It seems "load profile" function is broken. When I started the game, I tried to set the new profile's name as "Lily." It didn't work; I went back to main menu, tried to load profile, saw that there was already a "Lily" profile with a score of 9999; went back again, made a new profile with another name, then went back and selected "load profile" again; the game immediately crashed. I restarted the game, and it continued crashing when I selected "load profile." I reinstalled the game, went through the same motions, and it still crashes in the same way.

Sorry for having a bad experience with this and having to reinstall it! I made a temporary fix for that by having the file itself renamed, though on paper, it shouldn't crash the game when you create a profile with the same name as some already existing. I put a dev profile for having to be able to check the unlockable features (spells and levels) without trying to beat bosses.

The stages are pretty short; I'm guessing you're going for a more boss-centric design, which is fine.

Yeah, the stages will serve as obtaining power-ups and such. I plan to make them about one or two minute long, instead of the current 30 seconds.

The patterns are well made and nice to look at, but some of them are kind of unfair. In some patterns it's possible for you get hit by a bullet that went off the lower edge of the screen; as far as I know, that's pretty unusual in shooters, since it should be "dead" at that point. I also had difficulties with the patterns where the bullets get sucked in but I ascribe that to me not using the portal (I didn't know how to use it for most of the game).

Glad you liked! My aim here is to have the player to be always away from the edges but also not to be too punishing by being somewhere else.

At the end, I got to the fourth stage (Parabola V), but when I got to the boss my shots didn't deal any damage to him. I assumed it was timed, dodged his first pattern for a while (100 seconds actually), but it didn't end, so I'm not sure what I had to do to get further. It might be a bug.

That's impressive! I wonder if someone might have tried to dodge the spells as long as possible without realising it. It was a bug. I forgot to remove his invulnerability upon completing the dialogue and uploaded a new version just before you posted the feedback.

Thanks again for playing and recording the game!

Thank you for playing the game! The music could be disabled in the settings as well as sfx (separately). As I have some peculiar melodies but only in my imagination and dreams, I plan to compose more songs for different bosses in the future and complete the current demo tracks. For now, I wanted to have some "music" in the game to see how it goes. Volume settings for music and sfx will be added some time in the future (because you could always turn down the main volume or similar).

Thank you for playing it! I temporarily removed the option for switching between the full-screen and windowed modes because it sometimes crashes the game in wine, even though on linux it works nicely. I am slowly transitioning the code to OpenGL instead of having SDL and there are some fixable issues with that that have to be tested first. Mouse issues will be fixed someday as the main priority is to have bosses mechanics done well. Plus, there's an alternative method of navigating the menu by using a keyboard.

> I played until the boss, the patterns are certainly interesting, it's too bad that slowing down does not show the player's hitbox.

Glad to hear that! I don't plan to add the player's hitbox and will leave it as it is.

Sadly I couldn't really engage with the other mechanics because remembering all the buttons is too overwhelming without a tutorial or on-screen prompts of some kind.

Also I think the boss music is way louder than the stage music, they should be the same volume for an enjoyable experience.

Thank you for the remark! The stage music was recorded with only digital piano while the boss music was composed using a DAW (LMMS) which is why it has a difference in the sound output. But I'll consider your feedback and will try to level them to be roughly the same.

Thank you for trying it out! Unfortunately, I have tested the game only in wine and haven't tried it to run on an actual windows machine. Though the UI could be related rather to the screen resolution as at the moment, it supports only 16:9.

I made it now to be in a windowed mode, it should help. Also, I capped fps at 60, so you should be able to have a proper experience. Thanks again for playing it!

Sorry, I have only tested it on 1920x1080 settings. I still have to fix the mouse issues. You can navigate with arrows, UP/DOWN, LEFT/RIGHT, ENTER/ESCAPE, and E (for achievements, profile, runes). Also, the game is made for V-Sync (60 fps). Without it, it's too fast. Thank you for trying it out!

Thank you for playing the demo and for the recording!

>ermm...... tbh the biggest thing for me is that I didn't find it very interesting, I didn't notice anything unique gameplay-wise other than being like Touhou, except for the portal thing, but it looked like just a minor gimmick to me. Could be wrong tho, you'll tell me.

That's okay. Indeed, the game for now is a typical bullet hell game.

>I wasn't hitting 60 FPS, so the experience was probably easier than it should have (still got cooked). Granted, I don't have a super good computer and I was recording with OBS, but I'd expect even then to consistently hit 60 FPS.

I haven't tested it properly on old hardware as it runs quite slowly. The game itself was mostly made for *my PC* which is a quite powerful though old xd

>* Bullets that instantly change velocity. I don't think it's a taboo, but I felt like I saw it a bit too much, and the changes were too drastic. I'm particularly talking about ones that were mostly stationary then shot at randomly. There isn't even any telegraph or graphic change or anything.

It feels random during the first runs, but their pattern is pretty deterministic. Though I tested them myself and yeah some rework has to be done to make it less annoying.

>* Bullets that instantly spawn near you. I even got killed one time on one of these, which isn't a good feeling, because I felt it wasn't my fault.

Although they spawn at certain points, I also found it being an unpleasant experience and will make them not spawning at all at the player position for certain attacks. At least, these are my thoughts for now.

>The biggest reason why I don't like these two things (other than me getting hit by them, lol) is that it makes the patterns feel less like patterns and more like random stuff on the screen. Sudden bullet changes in position/velocity are jarring in my opinion.

This is what I'm trying to accomplish, to make it a bit more chaotic but not too much annoying.

>* Some bullets hide other bullets. In Parabola 2, there's a pattern with White Balls and Knives raining down. Both are white, so knives can sometimes overlap and become invisible basically. In Parabola 4 I had a similar feeling with both bullet types (dark and light)... Then again, bullet overlap is impossible to avoid, so idk about that one, I'm just telling you what I felt. But the thing in Parabola 2 could be improved for the player by changing the colors of the knives.

I try to make different attacks to be of different colours and/or shapes. With Knives I think I'll have to make them a bit of different colours. Overlapping comes down to the attack patterns themselves, so I just have to make them better xd

>I like the aesthetic and the character designs! Well, MC looks a bit plain, but the rest of the characters look interesting, and so does the UI and everything. I kind of vibe with the story from what little I could tell as well. So the game's got identity I felt like.

Thank you! MC will be obviously redrawn as she will take lots of time of doing so, having different reactions and such. The rest in that regard are much "simpler".

>* Cursor doesn't match the cursor icon

I thought I fixed it properly this time but seems it still broken. Damn :(

>* Q quits the game, but the thing is, Q is near so many other keys, I pressed it on accident. Making it hold to trigger or just, really, not having it, would be better.

I changed it to being able to use only in menus and during the pause. I'll upload a new version which will include other various fixes as well some time later.

   * Kind of random, but I feel like it could use a more chuuni name.......... but maybe it's fine, I did try it after all

Noted.

Sorry if I was too harsh!! I can tell there's passion behind it, good luck :)!

Again thank your playing and for the feedback! For me it's very useful to understand how players feels about the game, even though there still too many things to complete as I might be oblivious to some things related to the game.

Thank you playing it!

I checked the VOD on twitch and I would say, first, congrats on streaming for almost 10h non-stop! Second, trying to play a bullet hell game when you are tired is quite an achievement.

it's hard to switch weapons or even focus on where the other end of the portal leads.

The game requires a bit of multitasking, though I want to make the placements of portals to be somehow easier to track. Switching of spell is for trying to keep at least some damage output constantly.

Summoning circle not moving along with the floating up-down animation of the first boss sprite is a tiny bit annoying.

The circle itself serves as an indication where the true hitbox lies, while the floating animation is just for visuals. I'll think about it being perceived as something annoying.

Enemies not having death animations (or attack animations for bosses) is a bit... I dunno, feels off.

There is some provisional animation but I reduced the number of particles, so the demo could be run on a potato.

Definitely needs music.

Without music it sucks, I know but it'll be added not too soon.

Also - I'm not the biggest fan of just starting with the boss without any prior enemies (like with the vampire girl), I do want a bit of warmup.

I also fixed the mouse issue, after seeing it working not properly in the menus,etc. (the game was made for only 16:9 at the moment).

Again, thank you for your feedback!

Thank you for playing my demo and for the feedback!

I checked out your stream and this gave me a couple of ideas after seeing someone engaging for the first time with it . It was very nice of you to record it as it's much easier to understand for me the main issues of the game and ponder later on on them.

I suspected some people might wonder about in-game sound/music. Seeing that you tried to check and update your system (especially, knowing the frustration of dealing with sound in some Linux systems!), I guess I have to put a sort of a disclaimer or so.

> There are no small goals to progress in, that makes it extra frustrating. In the subsequent levels I could at least feel "wow I shot two of the small dudes before dying."

The game uses V-Sync to cap it at 60 fps at the moment, so this is why without which it was unbeatable essentially (making it to the next stages is an achievement in itself!). I guess I have to make it "properly" sooner or later. At the moment, you can edit the levels in the data/levels/"level name"/phase_one.json if you want to try different patterns of monster spawning.

Now concerning your feedback (which is also much appreciated):

• I made these levels available for the demo having full abilities. The story is supposed to have some progress up to this point. There is in fact two arrows by sides which lead either to the previous act or the next one. I guess the grey colour indeed makes them seem to be locked (one still can click on them and/or use arrows to navigate the level selections).
• Noted;
• Noted;
• Thank you!
• Yeah, after I uploaded the Linux build only, this also came into my head and I wondered how many people would reconsider downloading the demo after seeing this. But, of course, it is better to be safe and run demos on a separate machine or in a VM or not at all.
• I haven't made a Windows build as I run out of time for DD61 as I still need to install and test it or so.
• For now, the runes change the last spell colour depending on the combination.

Again thank you for testing it out!