itch.io

I would like to keep the 2D gameplay as an option like bonus stages or something, I also planned to have classic touhou shmup segments as a sort of hacking minigame. In the end it all depends on how much I can afford to work on the game, polishing the 3D version is requiring a lot of my energy and fixing the legacy 2D is the lowest of the lowest priorities at the moment, but I'm definitely not taking it out of the codebase

Hopefully the added vertical component makes for more interesting levels, I already started finding interesting ways to add secrets, things like jumping off a walkway onto a pipeline leading into a opening km the wall with ammo and weapons.

Movement should be pretty much the same as the 2D version, the isometric view pretty much handles the bullets the same way as 2D

Characters will remain 2D sprites , I'm having fun modeling various props in 3D but characters are way beyond me, I think sprites still look neat and thanks to the isometric perspective I can reuse the same ones

Guess what? That game was the main inspiration and design guide, I've been wanting to make a game similar to it for a long time but I had to settle for top down 2D at first because I was still learning Godot  but now I feel like I can actually get closer to my original vision

Hey thank you for checking it out, In the past few days I improved on a bunch of stuff and I hope to put out a new demo soon

I rebalanced weapon damage, added feedback for hitting enemies with some knockback and blinking, made movement more interesting by having Cirno float and be faster but still kept the precise movement of focus mode, increased ammo for other weapons, fixed the weapon ammo counter in the hud, made the camera slightly pan towards the cursor or aiming direction so it's easier to keep what you are shooting at in sight, I remade a lot of graphics for floors and walls to be grittier and look better, ability to rapidly switch weapons through the mouse wheel, and I'm about to replace the cursor with an aiming reticule so it's less annoying to aim at enemies with the mouse

You are right about the alarm mechanic, I still haven't managed to use it to its full potential, alarms are supposed to spawn new enemies through teleporters and off-screen as long as the alarm is playing but I haven't implemented it yet, I'm considering adding more to the alarms mechanic even in roguelite mode to spice it up.

Story mode will get an overhaul eventually, I'm planning to better pace the exposition in the intro and in the tutorial, making text skippable, and optional dialogue nodes.

Finally, the bullet freeze mechanic is still in early development, I'm planning to tie it down more to the motivation mechanic as a way to gain more of it by freezing a lot of bullets together, motivation is the principal currency for player lives and the current way of gaining it is too slow

Thank you a lot for playing

The gamepad controls are still very barebones and I'm aware the right stick aiming is completely broken, that's something that's going to eventually get fixed, I also agree on the autoaim, since a big influence lately has been enter the gungeon, I don't think I would be able to play at all without the game automatically snapping the aim towards the enemies, so that's definitely going to be implemented at some point.

Ammo is going to be rebalanced too, it's just a matter of deciding what the damage values are going to be, it's all fluctuating at the moment, for instance in test builds I now made the base gun fire much faster but with lower damage to mimic the way touhou games handles the player weapons, right now I calibrated the base weapon to take a bit longer to kill enemies than the specialized guns do.

I'm also going to add enemy blinking and knockback eventually, so that there's feedback that the enemy is actually being hit.

I'm also working on graphical upgrades, remaking the floor tiles to have more detail, the walls are going to receive the same treatment soon and I hope I can make them look like actual walls, perhaps by trying out some perspective

Also character speed has been complained out a lot, I'm definitely going to make Cirno float and have some friction to reach top speed and slow down when not focusing, hopefully controlling her will become more fun... unless it gets worse.

Minimap is probably going to happen eventually, I already made one for roguelite mode, I'll see what I'll be able to do.

Also you might have missed it (because I didn't really put it in the tutorial) but by pressing Q you can freeze enemy bullets at the cost of shield power, great for emergency situations, I'm considering tying it to the gain of Motivation, where freezing a lot of bullets at once would grant you a lot of it, but I might have to make enemy boss patterns harder to compensate, we'll see

> Maybe use a toggleable outline shader for all interactables?  Or some other finder thing. Though that may look messy given the pixel art. Guess that's a bit of a bandaid fix. 

I do have an outline shader available, I'll definitely try to play around with it, maybe I can have the outline be more evident as the cursor goes over it.

> Though, I did use the pistol for most of the way to Rumia.

Another commenter made me realize that the main gun works better if it fires really fast but is really weak, the way the main weapons in touhou games work, I've been testing it out and it seems a bit more interesting, for now I calibrated it so that killing an enemy with the base gun is still slower than using the repeater rifle.

> Or, one time I accidentally got sucked into the walking-towards-telepad animation when walking near.

That's definitely annoying and happened to me a bunch of times too in testing, I'll definitely want to reduce the collider size, maybe even make the teleporters manually activable so they won't trigger automatically, the walk animation could also be faster. I don't think I can make the actual dematerialization/rematerialization animation shorter without glitching it out 

>Some other ideas could be, locking the room behind you until you kill all the enemies; so you don't take pot shots from the hallway, or enemies that spot you will notify other enemies in their own line of sight. Though, idk how hard that would be when you have the alarm system. But I don't think I ever saw an enemy cause it, only cameras.

I actually do that in roguelite mode, I can do it in story mode if I place the appropriate triggers but I still think I should allow potshots from the hallway, the colliders on the higher edges of walls prevents angling the shots too much and I think the player should be punished with a harder room only if they trigger the alarm, something I haven't really capitalized on in the current demo but it's something I really want to do eventually

> Also a bug I forgot to mention. I got to the yellow keycard area, and I tried to open the door without the key several times. Later I returned with the key, but surprisingly the door was already opened. Did it remember me trying to open earlier, and auto open after collecting the key? Kind of odd.

That was a failed attempt at giving the player two different ways to clear the forcefield, I linked a capacitor in the southern branch to the forcefield but since I haven't implemented camera terminals yet the player would have no idea that they just opened the passage, plus if you visit both branches then it becomes redundant, there's still a lot I have to learn in making the maps, killing the capacitor as an alternative should have its own challenges other than just two or three enemies in a hallway.

Anyway thank you a lot for the ideas and feedback, it's been invaluable to me

Thank you for playing!

Sadly I wasn't able to dedicate much time to fixing up the controller experience, aiming is really wonky, among other things. I'll try to fix it up eventually

All valid points, in fact you reminded me why I made the initial gun way faster at the beginning of the development, but then I eventually ended up making it slower to make the other guns feel more useful, but it might just make more sense to have the main gun be more like touhou standard weapons and shoot really fast with weak power, then add more projectiles and effects as P is collected.

About freezing: I recently implemented a bullet freezing mechanic similar to Great Fairy Wars, right now it's just a panic button but I'm thinking it can turn into something more involved in the gameplay, I still want to keep the focus on the weapons, the in-story reason is that magic does not work as well in this cyberpunk world as it does in gensokyo, Cirno's main strength is being able to come back from death as long as she has motivation.

You aren't the first person to complain about movement speed so that's definitely something that needs to change, I'm also considering eventually implementing status effects so that freezing can be something ice weapons shots do, it's just hard to not accidentally make some weapons so overpowered that there's no reason to use other weapons.

You also just gave me a great idea: Cirno could float all the time and have some friction to speed up and slow down, unless focus mode is engaged which would make the speed constant, in order to avoid bullets, this also solves the issue of having cirno face one way while she shoots another way, she can always face towards the direction she's shooting at if she floats and it will still look good

Thank you for trying the game out!

I'm still trying to strike a balance between dialogue and tutorial, you are right that it feels a bit annoying to be interrupted all the time, I get annoyed in testing too, I still haven't found a good solution to that, in fact I cut out quite a bit of dialogue already, perhaps I should just make the tutorial longer, add more play time between tutorial sections so that the player can play around more with the tools they are given.

About the enemy sprites, there's currently a bug in the animator code that makes them be stuck in the wrong frame, I haven't had the time to fix it, usually they turn the way they walk.

Good to know about the art palette clash, I'll what I can do in the future aobut it.

You are right that the tutorial end is a bit abrupt, looks like the intermission between tutorial and level 1 would be a good time to add a little bit of story and exposition, maybe split the initial briefing so that the actual objective of the mission is talked about when the mission starts.

Reloading is kind of messy right now, there's a little glitch in the weapon display that makes the HUD not show the default equipped weapon until it's manually equipped, that's going to be fixed when I overhaul the HUD, along with adding a display for the current keycards and important items like points, P, medikit and shield recharges, so that opening the inventory is not required every time.
I'm also going to add force reload on R and a visual display of the weapon reloading.

Gun(and other) SFX could be better. I don't see why you can't base most of it off of sounds from touhou. 
There are legal issues to that, according to Zun's official guidelines for fangames I'm not allowed to use assets directly extracted from the games, for some sounds like death and graze I was able to get away with it because ZUN made them from preexisting sounds and I'm using versions of them that were made from the same original sounds but have free licensing, for other sounds I'll have to either commission somebody to make knockoff or find alternatives.

Hard to read interactables has been a common complaint, I'll eventually try to do something about it, perhaps play with color coding more, I've been using a limited 64 colors palette but it's been extremely limiting, it doesn't look like the best choice.

I'm aware there is an ammo balancing issue I'm still trying to solve, weapons even used to come with an extra ammo pack but I had to change it when doing roguelite mode, perhaps I should bring that back and fill the ammo storage when a new gun is obtained, like enter the gungeon does. I'm also planning better way to equip  guns, I tried to implement weapon switching through mouse wheel and gamepad buttons but some bug prevents it from working and I haven't gone back to fix it properly, but I will

Yes, the weapon ammo display is wonky because when the weapon is autoequipped and the event is fired the HUD is not listening yet, it's a thing I have to solve through better queuing.

I didn't really want the teleporters to be jarringly fast, you could say the animation is for "flavor" rather than any other gameplay reasons, enemies are supposed to come out of the teleporters when alarms sound and the animation will be helpful in being able to react as they come

Yes that's a graphics Y sorting issue I still haven't got around to fix, I've been giving it a very low priority since so many other things are currently on fire, but the intention is to have characters and items properly hide behind tall objects eventually.

I've been noticing the dullness myself lately even while playtesting, I have things in mind to spice it up like enemies spawning out of screen as reinforcements, more traps, puzzles, etc. In the roguelite mode I noticed it gets more interesting when there are more than two enemies shooting at you, going through a map definitely shouldn't feel like an empty walk through a park.

You fell victim to me not properly pointing out that the fridges could be used to set checkpoints, that's another thing I plan to improve in the future.

I actually had optional info points in the tutorial at a certain point but decided to scrap them when I added the in-world labels, I'm thinking it might be worth it to reintroduce them so that the player has choice on whether to engage into clarifying dialogue or not, important things should definitely be signaled in more obvious ways.

Also I don't think you found any secrets, perhaps I hid them way too well, I'm thinking I should have the AI companion at least try to point out the first one for free in order to train the player to look for them.

Thank you for all the feedback! It helping me refining my ideas a lot!

Really good presentation, I like the character designs a lot and the tutorial is simple and to the point, the humor and writing are really good, I'm having a lot of fun playing through the demo, one nitpick of mine would be that hitting the enemies doesn't feel impactful enough and that the very short music loop gets boring fast

- No tutorial
- Jumping physics are really weird, it's really hard to control the character
- I'm sorry I got frustrated really fast
+ Game doesn't crash

There doesn't seem to be much to the game right now so it's hard to say more

Disclaimer: I have ADHD and I get easily overwhelmed by long text

So here's some stuff:

+ I like the concept of waifus in mechas
- Game shouldn't infodump all the keyboard buttons on me at once before starting the tutorial
+ There's a controls list in the pause menu
- I had no idea I could check the controls in the pause menu before poking around
- The game shouldn't tell me to press the "heal button" to open doors but should actually tell me what the button is, it did tell me to press Shift to sprint right before that
- The tutorial makes me feel a bit overwhelmed, there are a lot of things on the screen at once and I keep failing to notice when there is dialogue on screen
+ The main game actually feels better paced than the tutorial, I have more room to get used to playing
- Shift + Back being the combination to turn around really messed me up whenever I tried to dodge backwards
- Levels feel too big and empty, enemies look really small compared to the environment
- Weapons other than the gatling gun are really ineffective, it's really hard to do any meaningful damage with them
- I keep missing the dialogueon the sides because I'm way too focused on the center of the screen

I like the concept of the game, mech movement feels nice, it's just too overwhelming most of the time

I really want to like this game because it's very touhou-coded but the forced full screen, mouse issues and no control explanations outside a paragraph on the page make it really hard to appreciate.

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

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.

One of the many AI pathfinding issues I'm often dealing with

You are right, sfx and vfx are not my forte and I've been focusing more on features than presentation but hopefully that will change. 

Funnily enough I had cirno turn into the direction she was walking in but I was told to make her look at the pointer instead, I agree it looks weird and I might try to take a hybrid approach in which the legs and the torso turn independently: legs pointed in the direction of movement, torso pointed towards the louse.

Visibile weapon similar to enter the gungeon has also been planned for a while but I've been postponing it, now might be the time, I do need to make presentation better now that my core gameplay is in place 

Looks like the soft lock on death is a bug I'm going to fix soon, other than that, yes most of the jankness in roguelite is due to the early stage of production, I'm definitely going to buff healing.

The bullet freeze is indeed a panic button, but I might try to make it more interesting by playing more with other resources, like giving motivation for freezing a lot of bullets at once for instance

I've been hoping I wouldn't need to manually reload but looks like it's inevitable, especially now that I made some weapons have longer reload times, I'll have to also make the reloading more visual, but I like the idea.

The softlock is likely because the player controller crashed, woops, I'll try to debug this ASAP

Thank you for playing!

You didn't hear the music because I was able to commission only one track and then the artist was busy for a few months and couldn't do more, the only track is by Fenekhu 

• Missable intro: thanks for letting me know, I might make it so that after a while the main menu loops back to the intro, I also have a button to play it again from the debug menu
• UI juice on difficulty selection: it's definitely planned, the difficulty selection was a pretty fast addition
• Thank you so much for using F as the interact key instead of E
  You're welcome
• Your explosions have mixels, that’s really jarring. On the other hand, the pixellated text during dialog is also a little harsh on the eyes and could use a thin outline or something
  Explosions shouldn't have mixels, they're sprites at the proper resolution, for the UI layer the mixel situation is a bit complex, having everything at 1:1 resolution makes rotated bullets look way worse due to how low resolution they are, I had to go for the solution that looked less weird. Also good feedback for the text, I'll see what I can do
• That Ice ammo looks just like some of the ammo pickups from Star Wars Dark Forces 
  That was indeed the inspiration!
• I like that ICE is playing everything completely straight. His intro gave me horrible flashbacks to Cuff from that Isekai game Sony made and thankfully he’s nothing like that.
  Thanks, having ICE playing it straight should give Cirno's dumbness more spotlight, I hope
• Once you get into the base it’s a bit hard to make out what’s floor and what’s walls. In general you need to employ more contrast in the tileset to make important objects a little more distinct because it all sort of blends together at the moment.
  That's an ongoing process, I decided to work with a 64 colors palette but that's obviously not panning out really well, it's hard to bring out contrast and I might try to apply more depth through out-of-palette color variations
• More fast-paced top-down shooters tend to frustrate me so I really appreciate this being a bullet hell crossover, dodging patterns is less stressful than trying to time shots against one-hit kills like in Hotline Miami. It’s reminding me a little of Barkley 2, I backed that back in the day and am disappointed it fizzled out. 
  Right now the gameplay is inspired by a weird mix of Crusader: No Remorse (action game from 1995), Enter the gungeon and touhou. Enter the gungeon has influenced the game a lot in the Roguelite mode on a game balancing standpoint,  it's a lot like touhou but less leaning on weaving between bullets, while on that front I'm going more towards touhou with patterns that always have gaps to slip through, with the ability to freeze bullets instead of rolling through them

Thank you, this is some really useful criticism, some of the stuff you pointed out is like that simply because I haven't got to do it yet, stuff like responsive SFX, some are known bugs, like the elevator, a lot is genuinely good like the art criticism!

> It took a while for me to realize the laser used your shield, and that grazing replenished it, although I might have missed some explanations, since I tend to get lost while reading.

I added the laser weapon and a hastily written dialogue for it a few hours before finishing the demo, not your fault for having missed it.

Have you tried the roguelite mode? That one is really fresh and still in badly need for balancing, it also introduces the bullet freeze mechanic, another mechanic I haven't really put in the tutorial yet and is only explained briefly in a text in the roguelite mode beginning room, proper tutorials for everything are planned but I've been focusing more on the vertical slice

On windows, I shot the drone and it started to fall, then it crashed

Game crashed in the tutorial, past the house and on the hill, I shot the drone in the next area from afar and the game closed itself

I'm still not sure, I definitely want to manually craft story maps, roguelite mode is going to be more useful to me for quickly testing enemies and weapons without having to build a whole map around them, I guess I can also experiment with puzzle designs in roguelite rooms first before using them in the story

Right now I'm experimenting with a roguelite mode, it gives me a chance to design more enemy variety and weapons and have something that can be replayed apart from the main game

Thank you so much for the feedback!

You are right, level 3 is where development ended and I didn't really try that keycard switch, you just missed an empty room with a thanks for playing message anyway. 

You raised a good point about the sprites not standing out, I'll definitely think about something to make intractables more obvious 

Circular colliders are artificial difficulty
game is 9/10

The art is great but aiming is really difficult

I want this to be real

Great demo, this is my first time trying the game out and I'm pleasantly surprised by how good it feels to control the character.

Sure there are a bunch of differences from metroid and it takes a while to unlearn them but what I tried feels good.

My main gripe is that bombs take too long to explode and make using them to jump and kill enemies in tight spots frustrating, also the charge beam doesn't feel satisfying to use because it's so difficult to hit anything with it.

Other than that killing enemies with the normal beam and missiles feels good, enemies are a bit health spongy but missiles take care of them pretty quickly.

Very enjoyable, I'm looking forward to future progress!

Indeed I didn't think about getting trapped by walls, maybe I'll just make them handpickupable

Since this page doesn't list anything and I don't seem to be able to add any sort of description here's important stuff to know before playing:

Controls:

• Move with WASD
• Change the currently selected item with the mouse scroll wheel
• Use the currently selected item with the left mouse click

Known Issues:

• Some sprites may appear over the player
• Placeable bed graphic is not complete
• Player respawns somewhere else when using the bed
• Chests can't be picked up (Temporarily disabled due to crash bug)
• Graphic is bad
• The bed inside the house looks like a person
• Vendor inventory appears empty after sleeping once
• the mine stairs need to be manually activated rather than being automatic

Thank you for the feedback, those are pretty much all known issues, I just need to work on it more

I definitely need to add a tutorial and better controls but sadly  I didn't have a dialogue system in place yet

Yeah the graphics are pretty bad but I plan on changing pretty much everything eventually, also the guy in the shed was a bed but it's my fault I can't sprite pretty much.