For context, I played at least the first level of all the minigames, but not much beyond that. I got up to the last stage of the fairy shoot 'em up
Here are misc. thoughts while playing:
- Being able to control the menu with just the keyboard would be nice.
- Higher or lower is a little too basic. The obvious optimal strat is to bet high on cards above 7 and low on cards below 7, with exactly 7 being a 50/50 . Beyond that it's pure RNG. The simplicity would probably be fine if coins were a currency that could be used in other mini games.
- Platformer should have the time in the corner somewhere if the intent is to beat it as fast as possible. I wasn't a fan of its physics overall. The jump is strangely floaty on launch and then you fall like a rock.
- I got filtered pretty hard by the letter editing game. It made me question whether I was secretly ESL or something because of how many words I ended up googling lol. I like the concept, though. Maybe it would help if it were clearer from the start what the final story is about, such as having a prompt at the top. I got up to 50% on level 1, and the correct text i managed to get did not seem all that coherent, which makes guessing feel a bit more RNG than it arguably should.
- Wizard dance being all or nothing makes it one of the harder ones. It should probably be more points-based rather than HP-based, where landing the input with the target partially in gives some points, and a perfect input gives the most. Later levels could be gated by a score threshold instead of what you currently have. This might be a skill issue, but it kind of sucks to get no feedback unless the inputs are frame-perfect. Also, the ASJK controls just seems... wrong to me.
Feedback for shoot em up specifically:
- Fairy girls are cute and their cutscene has very nice art. I like how their in-game animations show off their personalities.
- I think the fairies move too fast for the amount of space available. I have only really played a bit of Touhou as reference for bullet hells, but those games usually let you move slower by holding shift. A feature like that would work well here.
- Enemy attacks aren't telegraphed very well. Got killed a lot by the sudden charges they would do. Some additional animations to indicate the start of an attack would help a lot. You already do this for the boss imp's fireball attack, where you can see him charge it up for a second. That one attack might be too telegraphed though since it's incredibly easy to wait out with the shield.
- Is the boss currently killable? I gave it about two tries where I was able to survive the full minute and 30 seconds while landing fairly consistent hits, and both times I got a game over from running out of time.
Overall thoughts:
- The cutscene writing is charming and the better part of the game. It would be cool if the characters were fleshed out a bit more and stories were more connected to make the world feel lived in.
- You are probably spreading yourself too thin with the number of games you have included. imo, I would focus on a smaller subset that have the most potential and flesh those out first before starting new ones. Also it's neat that you're enginedeving for this.
- You can control the map with W/A/S/D and the space key, although it might be a bit buggy at the moment. It wasn't a super high priority for me.
- I actually do have a plan for coins being usable outside of just the Higher or Lower game mode! It will probably be a long time before I get around to implementing it, but it is coming.
- Good idea about the time, and I'll try redoing the physics in the Platformer mode. Maybe I can get them to feel better.
- I've completely redone the first level of the Letter Editing mode, but I haven't uploaded it here yet. In the new version, there are three, short passages, instead of one long one. I think it's a bit more manageable this way.
- In the Wizard Dance mode, you'll get a blue circle if you hit a note perfectly, and a yellow circle if you're close but not exact. And if you hit the wrong note, the correct note will turn grey, meaning it's too late to press it now. If you don't press anything, an X should show up. Originally, this game mode used W/A/S/D instead of A/S/J/K, but most people told me W/A/S/D felt wrong. A/S/J/K is what Clone Hero (by default) uses, so I figured it was probably the best option. Remappable controls are definitely something I'd like to add someday, but I just haven't gotten around to them yet.
- Yes, the artist did a fantastic job on all the fairies, the imps, and the cutscene. I'll pass your feedback onto her.
- Neat idea about being able to move slower. I'll play around with that and see what happens.
- Definitely a good idea about the enemies' attacks. I'm still finalizing how some of them move and attack, but I'll ask the artist about adding a few extra frames before they attack.
- I may have completely forgotten to explain it, but the boss can only be killed by deflecting its fireball attack. When you do that, it'll split up into a bunch of smaller imps that can be killed individually. Someday, I'll get around to adding a cutscene which explains this much better. You can see a video of this boss fight here: https://files.catbox.moe/a34vya.webm
- I'm glad you like the writing! I've tried in the past to write some "funny" games, but a lot of them did not land very well.
- For my next DD submission, I've already decided to remove many of the levels currently in the game, and only have two or three levels for each game mode. Hopefully this will allow me to polish up each individual level as much as possible.
Thank you so much for playing, and I'll keep improving it as much as possible!
the more different genres you add to a game like this the easier every game needs to be, since not everyone plays every genre. it also doesn't help that most of them have bad gamefeel and are kinda jank to control.
fishing game: fish are very fast when you hold the wrong button, but luckily my boomer reaction speed can keep up with it. story is kinda funny.
rpg: enjoyable enough. the enemies don't really do all that much so the healer can just heal everything no problem
rythm game: time margins are extremely small. playing actual music to a metronome is way easier.
dragon game: movement is way too sensitive for the amount of tight spaces i need to fly through. also kinda unclear exactly when he starts aiming in a direction if i move my cursor.
platform game: sensitive movement combined with the heaviest gravity known to man
shooting game: i can't aim fast or at all so this one will never be possible for me at least
wordy game: interesting concept. maybe give a little more time?
after finishing the rpg i found myself just going to the next game if i died once instead of retrying. playing the cutscene again on restart adds friction
You're definitely right about the RPG and the movement in the Dragon Run game. I'm still hammering out all the fine details.
Can I ask why you were having trouble aiming in the Shooting Gallery mode? It's basically just a point and click, but with moving objects.
You can skip the cutscenes by pressing Esc and then Space. There's also an option in the Options menu to automatically skip the cutscenes when you click Retry.
i'm just bad at shooters so the parts at the end where there were superfast targets seemed impossible for me. i didn't know i could skip cutscenes. maybe make the "skip on retry"-toggle turned on by default?
Very fun game, I enjoyed it! I like the nonsense humor and the variety of minigames. Everything is pretty intuitive too, but I think the difficulty varies a lot. Some minigames are way harder than others. The letter is incomprehensible to me, I would need at least 5 attempts of trial and error to figure it out but at that point it's no longer a short 90 second minigame. Meanwhile things like the JRPG fight and the tower defense barely require you to do anything on the first stage. The shoot em up is also way too fast, although it was fairly (no pun intended) easy once I realized you can just hold the shield as much as you want. Maybe you could make the shield instant but only for a short duration if you want it to be fast-paced?
One minor bug I found is that the timer still runs when the game is paused and it messed up my score at the end. Everything else seemed to work fine.
And another suggestion I have is that if you're going to have multiple levels of the same minigame I would like to see more new mechanics being introduced, usually there is very little difference between them so it gets a little repetitive.
Comments
For context, I played at least the first level of all the minigames, but not much beyond that. I got up to the last stage of the fairy shoot 'em up
Here are misc. thoughts while playing:
- Being able to control the menu with just the keyboard would be nice.
- Higher or lower is a little too basic. The obvious optimal strat is to bet high on cards above 7 and low on cards below 7, with exactly 7 being a 50/50 . Beyond that it's pure RNG. The simplicity would probably be fine if coins were a currency that could be used in other mini games.
- Platformer should have the time in the corner somewhere if the intent is to beat it as fast as possible. I wasn't a fan of its physics overall. The jump is strangely floaty on launch and then you fall like a rock.
- I got filtered pretty hard by the letter editing game. It made me question whether I was secretly ESL or something because of how many words I ended up googling lol. I like the concept, though. Maybe it would help if it were clearer from the start what the final story is about, such as having a prompt at the top. I got up to 50% on level 1, and the correct text i managed to get did not seem all that coherent, which makes guessing feel a bit more RNG than it arguably should.
- Wizard dance being all or nothing makes it one of the harder ones. It should probably be more points-based rather than HP-based, where landing the input with the target partially in gives some points, and a perfect input gives the most. Later levels could be gated by a score threshold instead of what you currently have. This might be a skill issue, but it kind of sucks to get no feedback unless the inputs are frame-perfect. Also, the ASJK controls just seems... wrong to me.
Feedback for shoot em up specifically:
- Fairy girls are cute and their cutscene has very nice art. I like how their in-game animations show off their personalities.
- I think the fairies move too fast for the amount of space available. I have only really played a bit of Touhou as reference for bullet hells, but those games usually let you move slower by holding shift. A feature like that would work well here.
- Enemy attacks aren't telegraphed very well. Got killed a lot by the sudden charges they would do. Some additional animations to indicate the start of an attack would help a lot. You already do this for the boss imp's fireball attack, where you can see him charge it up for a second. That one attack might be too telegraphed though since it's incredibly easy to wait out with the shield.
- Is the boss currently killable? I gave it about two tries where I was able to survive the full minute and 30 seconds while landing fairly consistent hits, and both times I got a game over from running out of time.
Overall thoughts:
- The cutscene writing is charming and the better part of the game. It would be cool if the characters were fleshed out a bit more and stories were more connected to make the world feel lived in.
- You are probably spreading yourself too thin with the number of games you have included. imo, I would focus on a smaller subset that have the most potential and flesh those out first before starting new ones. Also it's neat that you're enginedeving for this.
Hey, thank you so much for the feedback!
- You can control the map with W/A/S/D and the space key, although it might be a bit buggy at the moment. It wasn't a super high priority for me.
- I actually do have a plan for coins being usable outside of just the Higher or Lower game mode! It will probably be a long time before I get around to implementing it, but it is coming.
- Good idea about the time, and I'll try redoing the physics in the Platformer mode. Maybe I can get them to feel better.
- I've completely redone the first level of the Letter Editing mode, but I haven't uploaded it here yet. In the new version, there are three, short passages, instead of one long one. I think it's a bit more manageable this way.
- In the Wizard Dance mode, you'll get a blue circle if you hit a note perfectly, and a yellow circle if you're close but not exact. And if you hit the wrong note, the correct note will turn grey, meaning it's too late to press it now. If you don't press anything, an X should show up. Originally, this game mode used W/A/S/D instead of A/S/J/K, but most people told me W/A/S/D felt wrong. A/S/J/K is what Clone Hero (by default) uses, so I figured it was probably the best option. Remappable controls are definitely something I'd like to add someday, but I just haven't gotten around to them yet.
- Yes, the artist did a fantastic job on all the fairies, the imps, and the cutscene. I'll pass your feedback onto her.
- Neat idea about being able to move slower. I'll play around with that and see what happens.
- Definitely a good idea about the enemies' attacks. I'm still finalizing how some of them move and attack, but I'll ask the artist about adding a few extra frames before they attack.
- I may have completely forgotten to explain it, but the boss can only be killed by deflecting its fireball attack. When you do that, it'll split up into a bunch of smaller imps that can be killed individually. Someday, I'll get around to adding a cutscene which explains this much better. You can see a video of this boss fight here: https://files.catbox.moe/a34vya.webm
- I'm glad you like the writing! I've tried in the past to write some "funny" games, but a lot of them did not land very well.
- For my next DD submission, I've already decided to remove many of the levels currently in the game, and only have two or three levels for each game mode. Hopefully this will allow me to polish up each individual level as much as possible.
Thank you so much for playing, and I'll keep improving it as much as possible!
the more different genres you add to a game like this the easier every game needs to be, since not everyone plays every genre. it also doesn't help that most of them have bad gamefeel and are kinda jank to control.
fishing game: fish are very fast when you hold the wrong button, but luckily my boomer reaction speed can keep up with it. story is kinda funny.
rpg: enjoyable enough. the enemies don't really do all that much so the healer can just heal everything no problem
rythm game: time margins are extremely small. playing actual music to a metronome is way easier.
dragon game: movement is way too sensitive for the amount of tight spaces i need to fly through. also kinda unclear exactly when he starts aiming in a direction if i move my cursor.
platform game: sensitive movement combined with the heaviest gravity known to man
shooting game: i can't aim fast or at all so this one will never be possible for me at least
wordy game: interesting concept. maybe give a little more time?
after finishing the rpg i found myself just going to the next game if i died once instead of retrying. playing the cutscene again on restart adds friction
You're definitely right about the RPG and the movement in the Dragon Run game. I'm still hammering out all the fine details.
Can I ask why you were having trouble aiming in the Shooting Gallery mode? It's basically just a point and click, but with moving objects.
You can skip the cutscenes by pressing Esc and then Space. There's also an option in the Options menu to automatically skip the cutscenes when you click Retry.
Thank you for playing!
i'm just bad at shooters so the parts at the end where there were superfast targets seemed impossible for me. i didn't know i could skip cutscenes. maybe make the "skip on retry"-toggle turned on by default?
Very fun game, I enjoyed it! I like the nonsense humor and the variety of minigames. Everything is pretty intuitive too, but I think the difficulty varies a lot. Some minigames are way harder than others. The letter is incomprehensible to me, I would need at least 5 attempts of trial and error to figure it out but at that point it's no longer a short 90 second minigame. Meanwhile things like the JRPG fight and the tower defense barely require you to do anything on the first stage. The shoot em up is also way too fast, although it was fairly (no pun intended) easy once I realized you can just hold the shield as much as you want. Maybe you could make the shield instant but only for a short duration if you want it to be fast-paced?
One minor bug I found is that the timer still runs when the game is paused and it messed up my score at the end. Everything else seemed to work fine.
And another suggestion I have is that if you're going to have multiple levels of the same minigame I would like to see more new mechanics being introduced, usually there is very little difference between them so it gets a little repetitive.
Oh shoot, I thought I fixed that pause/timer glitch. I'll take another look at it. Glad you liked it, and thank you for the feedback.
CHANGES SINCE LAST DD:
==== FISHING ====
Added new SFX.
Re-did the "Success" screen.
==== WIZARD DANCE ====
Re-did the results screen.
==== SHOOTING GALLERY ====
Replaced sprites.
Re-did the results screen.
==== LETTER EDITING ====
Changed the background in the Spellcheck mode, making it look more like a piece of paper.
Text is now rendered at float positions instead of integer positions, making everything look a bit smoother.
Re-did the results screen in the Spellcheck mode.
Added an extra "problem" to the second level.
Replaced the third problem in level 3. I think the original was too hard (at least for this early on in the game).
==== TOWER DEFENSE ====
Re-did the "Success" screen.
Added new SFX.
Replaced "NUM COINS: " in the HUD with a single coin icon.
Added some grass and flowers to some of the levels.
Some weapons won't be available until later levels.
==== SHOOT-EM-UP ====
Re-did the results screen.
Re-did the HUD.
Re-did Level 1 intro cutscene.
Enemies with more than 1 health now wear helmets.
Added an intro cutscene to level 2.
==== JRPG ====
Added a background when choosing abilities.
==== DRAGON RUN ====
Re-did the results screen.
Re-did the HUD.
Added a background.
==== IMP LAUNCH ====
Re-did the game over screen.
If you die with a splat, there's now a chance you'll be able to see the corpse of the previous imp when you retry.
==== PLATFORMER ====
Added results screen.
Score is now given in points instead of time.
Improved camera (although it could maybe still be better).
Added a very basic, still very much WIP cutscene to the first level.
==== HIGHER OR LOWER ====
Added new SFX.
==== MISC ====
There's now a transition screen between the endings of most levels and the beginnings of the subsequent cutscenes.
Re-did the Pause menu.
Fixed a memory leak caused by not properly deleting levels when transitioning from the Pause menu to the Map screen.
Fixed a bug in several of the game modes that caused the timer to continue counting down, even while the game was paused.
Re-did the Options menu.
Changed the font up a bit, so it's hopefully more readable now.
Added the ability to change cutscene text speed in the Options menu.