Play Masterpiece
Strongest Quest's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #6 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Balance (Challenge & Fairness) | #15 | 3.387 | 3.387 |
| Audio / Music | #17 | 3.581 | 3.581 |
| Story / Writing | #19 | 3.194 | 3.194 |
| Overall | #19 | 3.742 | 3.742 |
| Visuals | #29 | 3.452 | 3.452 |
| Concept | #37 | 3.226 | 3.226 |
| Use of Theme | #40 | 2.581 | 2.581 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
Fumorin, Mollyco
Streaming Permission
Yes
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Note: It took some time for me to get back around to finishing comments on the jam games. Pardon the late comment!
Your jam games are always really delightful to play! The visuals and writing in this one have a fantastic personality, and the music is fun to listen to throughout the course of the game. (Mollyco's banner art also adds a lot to the game's look! Good collaboration!)
The concept and theme use are done really well with the way that the player's aircraft can be customized. Choosing your own selection of equipment can make for some fun playstyles. I wouldn't mind seeing more stages to play for a while longer, and I can see room for some visual clarity - but what was there was a lot of fun high-energy schmup-ing.
Overall, it's an excellent quick game! I always enjoy the little surprises and creativity in these games. Thank you for making these!
very cool. unfortunately the shot build thing was mostly not a success (mainly behind the scenes balancing and like coding complexity) so that will probably not be a thing for the future shmups... but might be like secondary mechanic select or something not sure yet.
hoping to cook up some things and systems to make the enemies in general more interesting without just cranking up the difficulty, mainly large enemies + extra movement from the attacks themselves etc. unfortunately got mega caught up a very evil and devious work + sleep cycle so i just havent been able to get anything done since this jam.
hoooping to tackle the visibility issues with some visual style changes potentially but for now i still cannot draw so the silly style will stay.
the next game will be evil and VERY devious...
Pretty cool game. The upgrade system was too complicated for me so I just put everything on focus damage and general damage and called it a day, and that worked out fine. At first the game seems daunting,it took me like 4 continues on my first playthrough. But I 1cc'd it on my second just through using charges and bombs proactively. So yeah, use those.I did play on standard so maybe those lunatics who play lunatic are gonna have a harder time.
ok but can she beat goku
way more difficult than i’m usually ready for when it comes to jam games, but that’s not at all a bad thing! incredible presentation, really fits for cirno’s big adventure. and given that it’s meant to be kinda jank and executes that perfectly, i guess that’s points for story/writing. the main theme-related part of the game seems to be the build creation, but i feel like there’s a lot of nuance to it that i just wasn’t getting. it took me a while just to figure out how to add multiple upgrades, and i had to resort to itch comments to learn about the 10-upgrade limit. and i STILL don’t know how charging works in the slightest.
as others have mentioned, visual clarity is the game’s biggest issue (at least in the jam build). projectiles are extremely fast and downright spammy at their worst, which is made significantly worse with the fact that the player shoots a huge amount of bullets as well. hitboxes were clear though, so it’s not all bad in that department! seriously that’s a MAJOR positive i hate bad hitboxes lol
fortunately, the bullet patterns were mostly fun to dodge. for the most part, the hard ones made me think “damn that’s hard i gotta lock in for this” rather than “literally what the fuck do i do here”, which tends to be a sign of well-balanced patterns. it’s also possible that some of the more baffling attacks just need better visual clarity to be learnable. as it stands, normal seems to be the most enjoyable difficulty, since lunatic (and presumably ultra which i didn’t want to try because that’s scary) turns the number of attacks that make me go “literally what the fuck do i do here” WAY up.
definitely going to revisit this one and try to practice more, and it’s a VERY good sign if i want to do that!
very cool. yea unfortunately the charge + upgrades stuff was a major miss (at least to me, both in design + gameplay). upgrades is sort of fine, but its a balancing hell and also supporting them for old + new stuff is a disaster. its still serviceable for a jam game though i think, but its definitely not very intuitive either, also mechanic overload for first play etc.
i definitely feel like the visual clarity is a problem having taken like a week break from the matrix since the jam end though, it was not so bad to me when developing it.. i think its mainly just to the projectile colors clashing, including the player projectiles.
it is partially the design to make the player shoot a ton of bullets for some funny power fantasy type thing idk the word for it, so the player projectile count is intended.
for the design its sort of meant to lean into cave-y stuff more than touhou, granted a 3 minute game with half a day of balancing doesnt really do either justice..
that being said im glad the difficulty select is at least a moderate success, since my last couple of shmup jam games were virtually unplayable for non shmuppers.
I feel like Tewi's second attack might be a bit unbalanced: I often get really walled. It's harder than anything else in the game (on Normal).
Charge attack feels too slow to be fun to use. Maybe if the player could fire while charging, but then there'd be no downside to just charging up just in case (and release before reaching 100% in case the charge was not needed). Maybe just let the player charge more quickly and balance the game around that. It also wasn't clear to me how or if the post-charge state has any scoring or survival benefits.
The top of the screen location of the charge meter confused me. I couldn't even find it at first. Swapping boss hp bar and charge bar location would be more in-line with a touhou player's expectation, but maybe you need the boss HP bar to be easily visible so the player can time boss kills for cancels?
Also, not sure about the shot customization. I spent my points in the unfocused shot to make the stage sections more fun, but then I felt tempted to dodge boss attacks unfocused and rammed into bullets as a result. Sure, it's my fault, but the customization system kind of incentivizes this and I suspect the game would be better without the ability to spec into focused or unfocused to not tempt players into min-maxing this and thus feel like they should only use half of their shot type.
I played the latest version, and I the game just ended after beating Reisen. Since jam games can sometimes be buggy, it's good to signal that the game was supposed to end there with a small 'YOU WIN' screen or something. It felt abrupt and unintended, as if the game ended mid-fight. A more obvious climax/final spell might also have helped to round the game off.
Also, Reisen's first attack comes out too quickly after her dialog, but you know this you danmaku troll.
yes. most of this is kinda just game jam jank & jank balance, but its still valid complaints and i agree, this would be more an explanation of the process than justifying/defending (and i do also appreciate the complaints (all of them), since its just stuff i might have missed and are very fixable).
the reisen attack was intended though, it has to do with what her last dialogue is, its kinda just a joke attack, its still probably a bit over the top and very unfair.
both the upgrades and the charge mechanic are pretty much failed mechanics, but there was not really any reason to just start over planning halfway in when i realised this.
the charge stuff is more or less a failed mechanic, but i suppose the 50% charge would be what you want to use to slow down the pace especially on bosses. theres 3x charge upgrades that will also speed it up.
i felt like the top of the ui was very cluttered to look at with the boss bar as well up there, and since you would probably be looking near the bottom when dodging big pressure anyway, it was a nice place to put it when youre about to blow up the boss as well. youre definitely right about player expectations though. (the real solution would just be to put the boss bar at both the top and the bottom?)
i suppose one solution to most of this could be like an infodump menu that explains the mechanics, and like a pause tip for the boss attacks (like the tewi 2 attack was meant to be fought around the center of the screen vertically, except on lunatic, would be a good ingame tip i think).
i very much wanted to avoid a UI hell situation more than it already is, so the only ui stuff for the upgrades is just the tooltip at the bottom, and the icons giving them a bit of identity so you can find them a bit quicker.
regardless with that many notes i hope it was at least relatively fun.
It was fun! Sorry if that wasn't coming through. Your games basically always display a good sense for fun danmaku and I've come to expect solid (but a bit janky) STGs from you, to the point that I even forgot to mention that I had fun in my comment. Really sorry about that. I'll say it once again clearly: the game is fun!
Regarding Tewi's second spell: I just replayed the game and I can see how being higher up helps. I think the balls just come out a bit fast for it too feel comfortable to be that close to the boss, but in hindsight, it's probably preferable to deal with that rather than the walls further down the screen.
Thank you for the game, and thank you for the detailed reply.
I might need a transparency slider for the particles but other than that
Edit: I swear on god I saw the word “PLACEHOLDER” when I died
i see youve met the placeholder laser... ill see what i can do for the future tho for visibility.
masterpiece
Aside from not knowing what or how the upgrades worked, had fun with the stage. Died quite a few times but it remained a fun experience!
yea the upgrades was a bit of a mishmash, just got the player balancing down mostly and moved on. especially the charge mechanic i think was a miss.
first player experience with all the things to pick is probably not so good for a jam setting i suppose. gg tho
Your game made my graphics card coil whine when the game loaded. I didn’t understand how many upgrades I could choose (10), and the projectiles were a bit hard to parse visually.
Other than those two nitpicks, the upgrade system is cool and the game is super fun. If there was a full Touhou game out there with a customization system like your game, I'd probably be more into shmups.
Also, sukusuku ship.
I laughed a lot so u get bonus points for that. I may bave also started lunatic without realizing so I had a much harder experience initially and probably thought the game was way harder than intended. But still, I think the projectiles moved incredibly quickly and I had to be on my toes. Could be worth giving those a look if you wanna continue this. Otherwise, the art was awesome and made me smile. Good work!