東方命雨滴～ Unification of the Artful Rain [v0.01b update]

~Hakurei Shrine~ > Rika and Nitori's Garage Experiments

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CrestedPeak9:
Okay so I started trying to score the demo and ran into kind of a critical issue.
If you have one extra life left and die, your bomb count doesn't go back to 3.
This is really bad because if you suicide with one life left then you'll end up with 0/0, which I suspect will be very frustrating even in 1cc attempts.

not ZUNs wife:
Playing on Normal to get to know the intricacies of this flow system you have in place. What it's like to score this game. Rewarding combos in bullet hell games is always neat, and the point-of-collection-only droplet resource creates simple but effective dodging scenarios.

Monothemeerp:
The only gripe I've had with the game was that the music feels a little unmemorable, but maybe that's just because I focused more on the game on my first go, I'll give it another whirl later.

I'm seriously impressed. These are some of the best patterns I've seen in a fangame (especially Stage 3 Boss. Beautiful!) which means a ton in the context of a Touhou game. The art is ZUN style but refined to a level where it looks really cute. The designs are great as well (again Stage 3 Boss in particular), as do the backgrounds.

Absolutely can't wait for the full version! The year of fangames is looking bright. And on that note, imma hop right back in another run.

Sparen:
My play through (Blind Normal 1cc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xADDN1WoC5Y

Overall, I found it to be a really beautiful game with superb (as expected) graphics and music. Danmaku-wise, it was also quite good, though having Doremy-style spirals in both Stage 2 and 3 felt a little repetitive (not to mention that having a survival in Stage 2 is a pretty hefty difficulty spike, especially given the nature of the spell).

My biggest gripes are contrast - stage enemies can blend in with the background, and some of the background elements seem like they could have a gameplay impact even though they don't. I recommend having some kind of magic circle/something to distinguish stage enemies from the background.

Looking forwards to the full game!

VYCM:
Played the demo 7 times, using every shot type and difficulty at least once. It's truly great, and I don't throw that around lightly. Here are some of my thoughts.

The overall package is cohesive and filled with personality. The title music is melancholy, but with enough drive to remind you that an adventure's about to begin. Art, backgrounds, and all other visuals are great and match the theme well. No complaints here whatsoever that I can recall.

The Flow system is well thought-out and adds an extra layer onto the basic Touhou gameplay without it ever feeling like you have to stop what you're doing to appease the game mechanics. Granted, UFO was pretty much the only official Touhou I had that gripe with (and to a lesser extent 10D, with enemies constantly producing spirits you can't autocollect), but it's still good. Collecting a bunch of droplets at once feels pretty good, especially after you've built up a long chain. The way the droplet-appearing SFX gets higher in pitch as your chain increases is perfect. Absolutely solid video game sound design there. I was confused for a bit why my Flow seemed to be randomly increasing and decreasing until I noticed there's a yellow part that records your potential Flow from droplets you haven't collected yet. I think that's a cool idea, but a small suggestion would be to maybe make that yellow section darker, or otherwise increase its contrast with the rest of the gauge, so it's not mistaken for just more Flow. By the way, I think it's funny how both UotAR and Sapphire Panlogism have rain-themed plots and items called "droplets", but in SP you can't collect them with the PoC, whereas in this game you can only collect them with the PoC. (Incidentally, I planned on posting feedback in SP's thread as well, but after reading the other responses there I felt like everything I wanted to say was already encapsulated.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the counter under the lifebar counting down to the next extend score instead of just displaying the next score you need to get (like in HSiFS). On one hand, it's kind of neat to see it count down several million when I score a lot of points at once, but on the other it's hard to calculate on the fly exactly what score I need to reach for the next extend. I'd be interested in seeing some other comments on this.

Suzume is cute. :3 The whole game's soundtrack is godly, but her theme is also one of my particular favorites. It's hard to talk about musical feelings in concrete terms, but it feels infused to the brim with "Here's our first opponent! It's the start of the adventure, so let's make sure you can handle what's ahead!" Stage 3's theme is also a favorite of mine. It captures very well the feeling of emerging into a mysterious parallel world where the skies are suddenly sunny and clear, contra what's happening in Gensokyo. I'm quite curious to see where this "alternate version of Gensokyo" thing goes story-wise.

The danmaku is, for the most part, superb. Just about all the patterns stand out with a unique identity and fit the character they're assigned to. The way Kousen's nonspells all start with those curling tendrils that break apart is beautiful. As Sparen pointed out, having a Doremy-style spiral as the last spell in Stage 2 and then immediately again as the first spell in Stage 3 felt rather samey. I do love both spells, but maybe Kousen's midboss spell could be slightly modified. And in spite of how much I like the idea, I agree that Mirerym's last spell is too difficult for its placement. I'm not sure if others had this same experience with it, but if I happened to die or bomb on it, the resulting bullet deletion made it hard to read the pattern, which meant I'd probably either die again or say goodbye to all my bombs. I'd suggest keeping the idea the same but just reducing the difficulty, and maybe experiment with making the bullets bombproof? Not sure how much that would fix things, but you could try it.

A few miscellaneous notes and suggestions for fine-tuning:
?The main title screen menu is (I think) the only menu that lets you continuously cycle through the options by holding an arrow key. I think that should be extended to all other menus.
?In the official games, dialogue causes all items to be auto-collected, which is most noticeable after you clear a boss's last spell card. It would be nice to have that implemented here.
?The game doesn't save the names that you input for scores and replays. This is particularly bothersome if you save a score and then immediately save a replay.
?Also on the name input screen, there's a pair of hyphens where the brackets should be, and trying to enter one of them into the name crashes the game. I suspected this was because of how Danmakufu parses certain characters in text objects, and putting some spaces at the beginning of a name confirmed it; the characters are inputted but the first non-space character you input will appear at the beginning of the line as if you hadn't inputted any other characters. You should be able to fix this by setting ObjText_SetSyntacticAnalysis to false for the text objects used in this screen, and then you can put all the [][][]]][[][][]] []'s you want in them, no syntactic questions asked. While I'm at it, there should be a square or something representing the space; it's just blank right now.
?Pausing and unpausing the game repeatedly can sometimes screw up the music looping. This has happened in my Danmakufu projects as well, and I don't know what the cause is. Just figured I'd report it and maybe someone can figure it out.

To conclude, there are a few things that could use small improvements, but UotAR is looking to be a great game. I'm eagerly looking forward to the rest of it.

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