Play game
Gensou Billiard's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Concept | #23 | 3.621 | 3.621 |
| Gameplay | #25 | 2.931 | 2.931 |
| Visuals | #28 | 3.586 | 3.586 |
| Story / Writing | #28 | 2.897 | 2.897 |
| Overall | #31 | 2.931 | 2.931 |
| Use of LGBTQ+ Themes | #31 | 2.897 | 2.897 |
| Balance (Challenge & Fairness) | #35 | 2.414 | 2.414 |
| Audio / Music | #40 | 1.724 | 1.724 |
Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
Ikqfang,Alice G Arunya,salk79
Streaming Permission
Yes
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
The concept of Gensokyo billiards is very unique! The theme-fitting portraits are really cool, including the outfits and talking animations.
The writing sets the premise well enough. (The boulder mishap was a good comical effect, for one.) Unfortunately, the genAI involvement detracts from the experience for me as it tends to add a dry feeling, for lack of better words. I encourage you to try other options for script writing & checking!
If it helps, I have seen a few different writing approaches around. For example, the scope might get limited to quick dialogues in order to write them thoughtfully. Many devs ask around to get good advice or insights, even if they're not able (or looking) to outright recruit a writer. Sometimes, a dev will even approach with visual storytelling, conveying the story via images rather than words.
(Examples from this jam include 「 Tewi jumps off a Mountain and Dies GAIDEN 」 (to an extent), 「 Finding Alice Margatroid III」, and 「 Seiga Draws Ofudas 」.)
As for the gameplay, I enjoyed seeing the random ball formations (ex: carrot, yin-yang symbol), which - combined with the character abilities and hole multipliers - made for some fun variety. On the other hand, the game turns ran extremely slowly. If the balls were to slow down faster at low speeds, the turn-end detection might run faster and help with the flow.
The game does fare well with its visual presentation front and center, though. Well done there!
Thank you for the suggestion for the writing, I actually experimenting the new dialogue system with dynamic face in the jam thinking that it might be reusable and make it less burden to the artist in the future for making sprite asset while wasnt thinking about the current scope and realise that no writer helping causing me to do this way, very sorry about that.
Also i want to deliver some joke before it get too old.
Gameplaywise I quite like the concept for this! though the pacing of the matches feel a bit slow, maybe there's too much health for the contestants. The art is very cute, I love the handsome looking alt outfits! Shame about the placeholder portraits but that's fine for a Jam. Unfortunately writing loses major points for the admission of using genAI, there's plenty of better options to get help with writing / spellchecking scripts for things like this, and while it's good to disclose that openly, it should be avoided for the future
Yea...sadly i underestimate the scale of the story system with the dynamic character sprite while the story im thinking is also very big scale with the minimal time i have before assign the character drawing to my artist and i cant find the writer to join my team, i have to use AI for helping in story direction and grammar fix while keeping my own humor is the quickest way to do
This is an impressive programming feat. I'm willing to be the entire game was made just for the spell system.
I accidentally skipped the tutorial but I was able to figured out things on the way although some things later rather than sooner like the x3 holes that would've come handy in the later stages to mitigate the RNG and the eventual continuous fight of spell card after spell card. Regardless I was able to figure out a strategy to beat the stages despite the randomness.
I love the concept of chaotic billiard, get as many as you can, is just incredibly fun, I would actually embrace more elements like mario party boxes or things to aim at and decrease the dependence on the spellcards to avoid the now is MY TURN that the last stages eventually inevitable grew into.
The humor is very silly to its favor. It really play into it and made me enjoy the wackyness of it all like how Marisa's room is just a normal room and things just being throw very casually but always with a lucky go fun attitude. With all the background story of how everyone did on the tournament, is just charming. I also got to love the initial balls patterns on the table.
My favorite part: The outfits are stunning, Marisa's outfit specially is just
beautiful >.<, I adore it!!!
It's pretty fun, though I have a few issues:
The lack of spin and momentum on the balls makes the physics a little unintuitive and the issues of how the spell card system works being rewarded MORE for your opponent scoring than them means you only score a little bit before the spellcards, which then becomes a game of "who doesn't die to this super chain?" because the supers do too much and the non-super cues don't feel like they do much more than help you a bit and your opponent a lot more. I really can't tell if I won barely all three times because of the supers or because of my own skill, because of how impactful the supers are, or if I just got lucky.
The characters aren't all that interesting and a bit flat, but it's not exactly the focus so I won't be too mean about it. The story itself feels weird because it both expects you to know the characters and acts like the characters haven't met before even though they have. (Note: by too much character, do you mean you had too many characters?)
I really enjoyed it. The adaptation of the pool rules was a lot of fun. The spell cards were ridiculously entertaining, and even though they could wipe out almost the entire table, the strategy came from deciding when to use them and when to avoid filling up your opponent's meter.
My only small criticism is that the dialogue would stay on screen until I pressed C. That might be intentional, but it interrupted the flow a bit. Oh, and the boulder on the intro stays in the next scenes moving slowly to the left instead disappearing.
Can you elaborate the problem? I think what you said might be some bug that happened in the game.
Sorry now I read what I wrote and I didn't described the problem properly. When I reached the end of the dialogues in every scene threw Z or clicks, the scene remained there, without advancing to the next scene, only pressing C changed the scene for the next one, for example when Tewi starts to remember, all the screen goes orange/white and I think it was supposed to change to the pool game scene next, but without pressing C this didn't happen and the orange background just stayed there.
The other thing I mentioned is about the boulder/rock that Marisa throws at the intro, when she shoots it, the boulder sprite starts to move left slowly and keeps doing this in the next scene where the shrine is shown destroyed by that same boulder, so 2 boulder are seen on screen on that very moment.
Pretty strange that the things you said happened even im pretty sure that i did prevent those bug before, and about the boulder it was supposed to be turned off on after crashing scene you strangely you said it was still there.
To be honest i dont know how to even replicate or fixing this one specifically.
Uhm I jumped to the next dialogues quite fast spamming click, I hope it gives a little hint
Yea i tried every way possible in spamming click thingy, but it still working fine except the dark foreground when you press C at the certain point which appear in gameplay.
It might be help if i know what you did or there are any screenshot about it and which version you play.
Unless hardware thingy might be the cause but im not confirmed about it, if it did i dont think i might know how to fix that either.
I would try my best for it.
Pacing-wise, I feel it could be better. Rounds are much too slow when it's just the basic billiards gameplay, due to how little momentum the balls seemingly keep. Meanwhile, once spell cards are loaded (particularly in round 2 and 3), the game basically turns into "whose super will give them the win?". Marisa's probably got the best one overall, so it didn't make the game too frustrating to "win", at least.
I enjoyed Gensou Billiards, but the first round starts off pretty slowly. Maybe I was just bad at the game and locked in for the next two rounds, or maybe it's because the ai intentionally makes bad decisions, but the first round left a bad taste in my mouth. The other two rounds were much faster paced and really benefitted from the smarter AI, as well as their spell cards being more aggressive and flashier. The only other real critique I have (besides the lack of audio, but what can you do), is that there were way too many placeholder sprites, but despite that, I really liked the finished sprites and I liked how everyone looked when dressed in the billiards uniform. Also, the ending was very cute!
Thank for playing the game, you are right about the slowness of the first round due to AI level i might change the health along with the balance of the spell multiplier in the game.
And yes i did a bit overscope about the story causing it have too much character it has in the game,and i thought it would a bit too much for both me and my artist to make more dynamic character and let alone with the amount of time i spent 60% on the story dialogue system and character so i decided to use placeholder just for now.
Dont worry the sound might be finish along with the balance in a week or so,But the character placeholder might be changed along with 4 more playable character in free mode after rating end.