itch.io

I just played the demo, and thought I would offer some feedback. I'm not sure what it is, but this game is visually difficult for me to parse. The look reminds me of a 90's Amiga or PC shooter, with a bit of a slick, shiny style, and a bit of flash. Somehow that clashes with the fast action danmaku-lite flow of the game, at least at first blush. Bullets are brightly colored and *should* be easy to see, but for some reason the graphical style makes it harder to parse. It also seemed like maybe the game felt just a tad stuttery to me. My setup isn't the latest & greatest, but it's not bad: I have an Intel i7-4770 running at 3.4 Ghz, 16GB RAM on board, and a NVidia GTX 1080 video card, so I assume this should run buttery smooth. But I think the flashiness of the graphic design may work against the shmup game play approach you're going for, at least insofar as things are harder to read, patterns more difficult to discern, and I end up getting hit by stuff I didn't even realize was already on top of me. Some of it might be that I'm playing on a large 4K TV, so while the play field is only about a 1/3 of the width of the screen, it's still quite tall, so I may have better luck on a smaller monitor. Either way, I found myself struggling just to figure out what was going on at some level, and wonder if taking just a bit of the spit-shine polish off the visuals might make things easier to distinguish from one another. I like the general idea you're going for, and I find multiple bosses during each stage a cool idea, not just a sub-boss and final boss, so that's a fun design choice. But it feels like you're trying to make a Psikyo game with a distinctly 90's Amiga inspired presentation, and the visual style is definitely making the game harder to read (at least for me) than I feel it needs to be. Just my initial impressions after a couple runs.