I aint feeling it, chief. Cutscene artwork is great, but the initial wall of text is... meh. Too much text for something Cirno is not supposed to care and/or understand. Pistol is extremely weak while other guns barely get any ammo. Overworld sprites are... fine. I dunno if it's supposed to be "Cirno meets metal gear" - alarm mechanic gives me that idea, but it doesn't do anything. Roguelike mode is better and more enjoyable than the campaign since you actually get more enemies to fight/bullets to dodge.
Graze mechanic is nice. Didn't beat the boss due to the gun being extremely unsatisfying.
Also I think freeze bombs don't reduce your freeze bomb counter.
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
Really cool! I got to the end of the demo. All the fully rendered artwork is great; I hope you add more of that style into the game. Reminds me of Enter the Gungeon. Grazing giving shields, and being able to spend shields in different ways, is such a great mechanic. All the text looked great (no typos, very nice) except for I.C.E. saying "You need to double click the item in the inventoryu to equip it.wa".
Cirno has a fucking gun, and im all for it. Played on hard difficulty with a PS5 controller and made it past the first boss.
I like the title screen and music. makes me wish there was music in game
First thing that jumped out at me is the analog controls for aiming feel pretty terrible. There seems to be independent deadzone in each axis which effectively makes your aim "stick" to the cardinal directions. This makes hitting anything pretty finnicky and is definitely a dealbreaker for anyone who wants to play with a controller. I think you can get away with just running a deadzone on the length of the Vector2 corresponding to right stick input
Arguably a skill issue but analog sticks are inherently less precise for top down shooters so I'm a big fan of adding some kind of aim assist if you want to support controllers
controller would only work half the time in the menus, i think this is happening when no UI node is currently focused and thus it is impossible to use the dpad to navigate to any other UI node. it would also be nice to switch menu tabs with L1/R1
shooting at enemies has basically 0 feedback and they take a lot of shots to kill. does not feel like you are doing any damage until they drop dead
sfx/vfx are currently pretty piddly and unsatisfying, im imagining this is already on the list for future polish but it will do a lot of heavy lifting in making the game feel good
I found extremely limited amounts of ammo and ended up having to fight the boss with 90% the ice pistol which felt anticlimactic
I really like the graze mechanic incentivizing some risk reward. The laser gun to use the built up shields from grazing is a great idea.
A bit hard to tell what is foreground/background assets. I wish interactables and important things had higher contrast while background stuff had less
Bullet hell patterns were fun to dodge through with the strafe, id like to see a bit more complexity (you didnt hear this from me but you should steal some from hildegard and lombard, that game has great patterns)
I encountered a bug where my pistol would not fire and instead would continuously reload. re-equpping fixed
Without a map i ended up stopping after getting the green keycard since i didnt remember seeing any green locked doors. I ran around looking for one but the movement speed being so slow made backtracking a slog. Probably a brainlet move on my part and it was right in front of me
The basic mechanics work pretty well and doing the actual bullet hell dodging is fun. The shooting does not feel fun right now. The boss is definitely the highlight for me. I think with some polish and more satisfying feedback that you'll have a pretty fun game on your hands. The concept carries it right now.
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
I didn't played much to be honest, but one thing that I spoted was that, playing with the controller, I aim with the right analog stick, but when I let go of the stick, the mouse pointer is still in the screen, and Cirno then aims at the mouse pointer.
It would be nice if you deactivated the mouse, if you identify that I'm using a controller.
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
The main problem is that the gunplay feels weak like throwing ping pong balls at enemies who do the same. In most Touhou games, the player attacks feel fast and powerful, like a gatling gun. With the sound of a machine gun when you are hitting the enemy. That’s missing here. The player also moves very slowly, which might make sense in a stealth game like Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy, but not when you're raiding a base. Cirno is an ice fairy, shouldn’t she be floating or moving in a way that feels more special? If this is more of a stealth game, Cirno should freeze cameras or enemies, float, or shrink to hide. Right now, she moves like a normal person, but she’s a fairy .W hy doesn’t she move in a more magical way? It doesn’t feel right for her to act like a human guard, it feels like a weird visual mod to another game.
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
-Amount of dialogue, continuing into the tutorial feels a bit much. I know you're trying to show off the characters, but being constantly interrupted while you're trying to learn the basics for an action game is annoying.
-The first enemy in the tutorial, its sprite faces right. It feels wrong when it started shooting me without turning(I wanted to sneek on it). Maybe make it more symmetrical, or some such.
-Character art seems a bit dark? Compared to the game at least it doesn't fit as well in the colorful landscape.
-Jumping from the tutorial end to the real game instantly was a bit jarring. Since it was stated the tutorial was a simulation, and you go into a telepad just to end up on a real telepad right after. I mean, for the moments you control Cirno before the conversation pops up and tells you it's the real deal.
-Being unable to force reload my gun, combined with no way to see the base gun ammo is annoying. It may incentivize the player to shoot until they reload before entering an encounter. Also, I notice that it won't reload after the last shot, instead I have to press shoot to make it reload an empty mag. Which seems pointless.
-Gun(and other) SFX could be better. I don't see why you can't base most of it off of sounds from touhou.
-Environment is very saturated, and kind of blends with the important objects too much. ie I missed a camera because it didn't stick out(or that's my cope), or how interactables like the pipe valve wheel is only reasonable because it shows a giant crosshair around it when you approach.
-Having to press 'i' to pick a gun from inventory, and only having like 10 shots with it makes me never want to use them. Make the ammo a lot more, or go for a 'pistol' + 'temp gun' setup where you can easily swap them. Also idk how to de equip a gun.
-Got a shotgun, and this weapon now has a ammo indicator, is the icicle gun just missing it? I have a lot of ammo, so I guess it isn't a problem now. [later] Oh I see now. The reason I was confused is that when you spawn, you have the Icicle Gun. But, it doesn't show the ammo for it. It's only when you equip it from the menu that the ammo indicator shows up, so I thought it wasn't the default pistol.
-Teleport animation feels a little long, considering it's suppose to be instantaneous. I don't think you need to do the cutscene walking to them, unless it's for a story thing.
-You can walk into the top side of obstacles, so Cirno's feet go a couple pixels past their edge. This is good for game feel, but half the things in the game get the sprite ordering wrong, so her feet show up on top of the sprite, instead of behind it.
-Game is fairly dull, but the sudden Touhou match with Rumia was a fun twist on it.
-I walked into some acid and now I must restart the level. Well, guess I'll stop here.
The idea of the game is fun, but the execution so far is lacking gameplay and polish wise. Dialogue is decent fun, but I do think there was too much to start with. Maybe section off some of the tutorial dialogue behind optional events, where the player presses a button to get help if they're stuck on a section of it. Or, do a thing where you allow players to do things while the dialogue talks at you. idk
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!
Cool, sounds like you got a good idea of what progress to make. Here's a couple clarifications and thoughts on things you said:
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
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'm aware there is an ammo balancing issue
You probably wrote this as you read, but to be clear, this statement of low ammo was spurred by the confusion of the ammo display. After I figured it out, it seemed fine. Though, I did use the pistol for most of the way to Rumia.
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
I think the animation is fine, it's just a little long when you want to quickly go between rooms. Or, one time I accidentally got sucked into the walking-towards-telepad animation when walking near. As for enemies, you can just have the walk-to animation be for them in all instances. And, the player only for cinematic parts like the start and end of the level. But, it isn't that bad as is. I just have a certain taste for minimizing cutscenes(no control) in gameplay.
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.
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.
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 did find that out, and I was a bit surprised. So that wasn't the problem, I died once to Rumia, I think once more in the 2nd half, then a 3rd when walking into that acid. idk if me having to restart the level at that point was intended.
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.
I did find a duct behind a crate near the (first?)blue keycard locked area. I went back there after getting the key, and it had some goodies and a shotgun I think, but its spread was so big that I opted not to use it.
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.
Thank you for all the feedback! It helping me refining my ideas a lot!
> 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
cirno with a gun, woooo i'm gonna be super honest, those were some of the least appealing gun sfx and vfx i have ever seen in my life. it's really hard to get engrossed in a shooter when shooting at the enemies is extremely unsatisfying. i found kind of weird how the direction the character is pointing at is handled by the mouse rather than by the direction you are actually walking towards. this leads to the weird situation where you are walking sideways, backwards etc maybe having a separate sprite for the gun, with the gun pointed via the mouse and the character oriented by the arrows would be more appropriate?
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
Linux version appears to mostly work fine, but I couldn’t hear any music except on the main menu.
This is my fault for using a tiling window manager, but having the two intros skip on any input means I missed the legal disclaimer and the intro from having to hit a key combination to switch to fullscreen. So I only got to read/see them after I enabled fullscreen in the options then exited and started again.
Did you do the music? The main menu theme is schway as fuck. I don’t know anything about touhou but I recall there being a big musical following.
There’s no UI juice on the difficulty select which was a bit jarring, I could’ve sworn the main menu had highlights and click flashes.
Thank you so much for using F as the interact key instead of E
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
That Ice ammo looks just like some of the ammo pickups from Star Wars Dark Forces
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.
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.
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.
Great game. I don’t know if it will have wide appeal but I like it a lot and the Touhou fandom is a huge pool of potential customers. I think the only thing you really need to focus on is clarifying the visuals.
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
Interesting concept. Game could use a manual reload button seeing as how R is unused and is next to the movement. There was also a softlock once I respawned at this spot after running out of 'motivation'.
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
First, I'll mention the game has spelling mistakes and then not mention it again since I don't think it's important. Some of them are pretty distracting though (like the Colonel saying 'extradimentional' right in the prologue). There's also some missing periods and other stuff that can be fixed by proof-reading.
The art is still very simple, and that's fine; that being said, I don't like the palette. At some point I thought a red bridge was a door. Maybe that's more due to the lack of shading, but it's not very nice to look at. The lack of music made me feel lonely. There's a severe lack of responsive SFX. I loved the portraits, they're very cute; the dialogue is very cute and fun, and the story is easy to understand.
Right after I started the game, I accidentally skipped the tutorial by walking on the teleport pad (probably shouldn't happen). When I went back to the prologue, I found out you can't skip the dialogue (not good). As to the gameplay itself, it's fun: I got lost sometimes, but that's more a level design question than a fault in itself. The level design, as it is, seems like a mix of Zelda-like dungeon crawler and typical top down shooter (I think that's the intention). At some point I accidentally teleported again and got lost (again, probably shouldn't happen). The Rumia boss fight was fun, but I feel like her hitbox is way too small. The red cross-hair is also too small and easy to miss; I couldn't really tell where I was shooting. You could either make it bigger, make the color stand out more, or make it follow the cursor, or maybe a mix of those, whichever you find better considering the gameplay. I think you should also be able to manually move the camera somehow, even if just a little bit off the edge of the screen, since vision is pretty important in these kinds of games.
I think some concepts could be explained better. 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 found one bug at some point, with the red elevator, where if you stood next to the button and pressed it would push you up or down as if you're moved by a mysterious force, even though you're not actually standing on the elevator itself. I found another bug, in the section with the remotely-controlled turret, where it would go through the door leading into the room even though it's closed; apparently the turret doesn't have collision there. Otherwise, it seems pretty bug-free. I liked this game, keep it up.
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
I actually forgot there was a roguelite mode (sorry) so I went back and played it. It seems functional despite some bugs. I'm guessing the rooms are random? I got a room once where the doors were freaky and opened and closed for no reason when I went through them. I died once (got to 0 motivation) and got an apparent soft-locked. When I respawned, I had focus on and I couldn't move or open the menu. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the mode specifically since I didn't get to 0 motivation during the story mode. You might already know this but I feel like I need to mention that the boss room is lacking collision in some parts so you can just walk out of it into the void. I suppose the consumables are kind of underwhelming, I feel like they should heal more. The bullet freeze works but I only found it useful as a panic button (it kind of reminded of Super Ledgehop. It's an old game now but it has a similar mechanic).
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
Comments
I aint feeling it, chief. Cutscene artwork is great, but the initial wall of text is... meh. Too much text for something Cirno is not supposed to care and/or understand. Pistol is extremely weak while other guns barely get any ammo. Overworld sprites are... fine. I dunno if it's supposed to be "Cirno meets metal gear" - alarm mechanic gives me that idea, but it doesn't do anything. Roguelike mode is better and more enjoyable than the campaign since you actually get more enemies to fight/bullets to dodge.
Graze mechanic is nice. Didn't beat the boss due to the gun being extremely unsatisfying.
Also I think freeze bombs don't reduce your freeze bomb counter.
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
Really cool! I got to the end of the demo. All the fully rendered artwork is great; I hope you add more of that style into the game. Reminds me of Enter the Gungeon. Grazing giving shields, and being able to spend shields in different ways, is such a great mechanic. All the text looked great (no typos, very nice) except for I.C.E. saying "You need to double click the item in the inventoryu to equip it.wa".
Cirno has a fucking gun, and im all for it. Played on hard difficulty with a PS5 controller and made it past the first boss.
The basic mechanics work pretty well and doing the actual bullet hell dodging is fun. The shooting does not feel fun right now. The boss is definitely the highlight for me. I think with some polish and more satisfying feedback that you'll have a pretty fun game on your hands. The concept carries it right now.
keep up the good work!
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
I didn't played much to be honest, but one thing that I spoted was that, playing with the controller, I aim with the right analog stick, but when I let go of the stick, the mouse pointer is still in the screen, and Cirno then aims at the mouse pointer.
It would be nice if you deactivated the mouse, if you identify that I'm using a controller.
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
The main problem is that the gunplay feels weak like throwing ping pong balls at enemies who do the same. In most Touhou games, the player attacks feel fast and powerful, like a gatling gun. With the sound of a machine gun when you are hitting the enemy. That’s missing here. The player also moves very slowly, which might make sense in a stealth game like Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy, but not when you're raiding a base. Cirno is an ice fairy, shouldn’t she be floating or moving in a way that feels more special? If this is more of a stealth game, Cirno should freeze cameras or enemies, float, or shrink to hide. Right now, she moves like a normal person, but she’s a fairy .W hy doesn’t she move in a more magical way? It doesn’t feel right for her to act like a human guard, it feels like a weird visual mod to another game.
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
-Amount of dialogue, continuing into the tutorial feels a bit much. I know you're trying to show off the characters, but being constantly interrupted while you're trying to learn the basics for an action game is annoying.
-The first enemy in the tutorial, its sprite faces right. It feels wrong when it started shooting me without turning(I wanted to sneek on it). Maybe make it more symmetrical, or some such.
-Character art seems a bit dark? Compared to the game at least it doesn't fit as well in the colorful landscape.
-Jumping from the tutorial end to the real game instantly was a bit jarring. Since it was stated the tutorial was a simulation, and you go into a telepad just to end up on a real telepad right after. I mean, for the moments you control Cirno before the conversation pops up and tells you it's the real deal.
-Being unable to force reload my gun, combined with no way to see the base gun ammo is annoying. It may incentivize the player to shoot until they reload before entering an encounter. Also, I notice that it won't reload after the last shot, instead I have to press shoot to make it reload an empty mag. Which seems pointless.
-Gun(and other) SFX could be better. I don't see why you can't base most of it off of sounds from touhou.
-Environment is very saturated, and kind of blends with the important objects too much. ie I missed a camera because it didn't stick out(or that's my cope), or how interactables like the pipe valve wheel is only reasonable because it shows a giant crosshair around it when you approach.
-Having to press 'i' to pick a gun from inventory, and only having like 10 shots with it makes me never want to use them. Make the ammo a lot more, or go for a 'pistol' + 'temp gun' setup where you can easily swap them. Also idk how to de equip a gun.
-Got a shotgun, and this weapon now has a ammo indicator, is the icicle gun just missing it? I have a lot of ammo, so I guess it isn't a problem now. [later] Oh I see now. The reason I was confused is that when you spawn, you have the Icicle Gun. But, it doesn't show the ammo for it. It's only when you equip it from the menu that the ammo indicator shows up, so I thought it wasn't the default pistol.
-Teleport animation feels a little long, considering it's suppose to be instantaneous. I don't think you need to do the cutscene walking to them, unless it's for a story thing.
-You can walk into the top side of obstacles, so Cirno's feet go a couple pixels past their edge. This is good for game feel, but half the things in the game get the sprite ordering wrong, so her feet show up on top of the sprite, instead of behind it.
-Game is fairly dull, but the sudden Touhou match with Rumia was a fun twist on it.
-I walked into some acid and now I must restart the level. Well, guess I'll stop here.
The idea of the game is fun, but the execution so far is lacking gameplay and polish wise. Dialogue is decent fun, but I do think there was too much to start with. Maybe section off some of the tutorial dialogue behind optional events, where the player presses a button to get help if they're stuck on a section of it. Or, do a thing where you allow players to do things while the dialogue talks at you. idk
Keep up the good work.
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!
Cool, sounds like you got a good idea of what progress to make. Here's a couple clarifications and thoughts on things you said:
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.
You probably wrote this as you read, but to be clear, this statement of low ammo was spurred by the confusion of the ammo display. After I figured it out, it seemed fine. Though, I did use the pistol for most of the way to Rumia.
I think the animation is fine, it's just a little long when you want to quickly go between rooms. Or, one time I accidentally got sucked into the walking-towards-telepad animation when walking near. As for enemies, you can just have the walk-to animation be for them in all instances. And, the player only for cinematic parts like the start and end of the level. But, it isn't that bad as is. I just have a certain taste for minimizing cutscenes(no control) in gameplay.
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 did find that out, and I was a bit surprised. So that wasn't the problem, I died once to Rumia, I think once more in the 2nd half, then a 3rd when walking into that acid. idk if me having to restart the level at that point was intended.
I did find a duct behind a crate near the (first?)blue keycard locked area. I went back there after getting the key, and it had some goodies and a shotgun I think, but its spread was so big that I opted not to use it.
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.
Glad it's of use.
> 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
cirno with a gun, woooo
i'm gonna be super honest, those were some of the least appealing gun sfx and vfx i have ever seen in my life.
it's really hard to get engrossed in a shooter when shooting at the enemies is extremely unsatisfying.
i found kind of weird how the direction the character is pointing at is handled by the mouse rather than by the direction you are actually walking towards. this leads to the weird situation where you are walking sideways, backwards etc
maybe having a separate sprite for the gun, with the gun pointed via the mouse and the character oriented by the arrows would be more appropriate?
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
The window mode is weird because the window gets big enough that you wouldn't notice the buttons to close/minimized etc.
But you can resize the window sort of.
Also think this enemy got stuck.
One of the many AI pathfinding issues I'm often dealing with
Linux version appears to mostly work fine, but I couldn’t hear any music except on the main menu.
Great game. I don’t know if it will have wide appeal but I like it a lot and the Touhou fandom is a huge pool of potential customers. I think the only thing you really need to focus on is clarifying the visuals.
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
You're welcome
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 was indeed the inspiration!
Thanks, having ICE playing it straight should give Cirno's dumbness more spotlight, I hope
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
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
Interesting concept. Game could use a manual reload button seeing as how R is unused and is next to the movement. There was also a softlock once I respawned at this spot after running out of 'motivation'
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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
First, I'll mention the game has spelling mistakes and then not mention it again since I don't think it's important. Some of them are pretty distracting though (like the Colonel saying 'extradimentional' right in the prologue). There's also some missing periods and other stuff that can be fixed by proof-reading.
The art is still very simple, and that's fine; that being said, I don't like the palette. At some point I thought a red bridge was a door. Maybe that's more due to the lack of shading, but it's not very nice to look at. The lack of music made me feel lonely. There's a severe lack of responsive SFX. I loved the portraits, they're very cute; the dialogue is very cute and fun, and the story is easy to understand.
Right after I started the game, I accidentally skipped the tutorial by walking on the teleport pad (probably shouldn't happen). When I went back to the prologue, I found out you can't skip the dialogue (not good). As to the gameplay itself, it's fun: I got lost sometimes, but that's more a level design question than a fault in itself. The level design, as it is, seems like a mix of Zelda-like dungeon crawler and typical top down shooter (I think that's the intention). At some point I accidentally teleported again and got lost (again, probably shouldn't happen). The Rumia boss fight was fun, but I feel like her hitbox is way too small. The red cross-hair is also too small and easy to miss; I couldn't really tell where I was shooting. You could either make it bigger, make the color stand out more, or make it follow the cursor, or maybe a mix of those, whichever you find better considering the gameplay. I think you should also be able to manually move the camera somehow, even if just a little bit off the edge of the screen, since vision is pretty important in these kinds of games.
I think some concepts could be explained better. 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 found one bug at some point, with the red elevator, where if you stood next to the button and pressed it would push you up or down as if you're moved by a mysterious force, even though you're not actually standing on the elevator itself. I found another bug, in the section with the remotely-controlled turret, where it would go through the door leading into the room even though it's closed; apparently the turret doesn't have collision there. Otherwise, it seems pretty bug-free. I liked this game, keep it up.
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
I actually forgot there was a roguelite mode (sorry) so I went back and played it. It seems functional despite some bugs. I'm guessing the rooms are random? I got a room once where the doors were freaky and opened and closed for no reason when I went through them. I died once (got to 0 motivation) and got an apparent soft-locked. When I respawned, I had focus on and I couldn't move or open the menu. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the mode specifically since I didn't get to 0 motivation during the story mode. You might already know this but I feel like I need to mention that the boss room is lacking collision in some parts so you can just walk out of it into the void. I suppose the consumables are kind of underwhelming, I feel like they should heal more. The bullet freeze works but I only found it useful as a panic button (it kind of reminded of Super Ledgehop. It's an old game now but it has a similar mechanic).
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