hey guys!!! this is my first cartridge that wasnt made following any tutorials, it took a lot of hair-pulling (im not a programmer) but i got it to a state where im cool with releasing a demo!!!

controls are X to fire, square to focus movement

see how high of a score you can get and post it in the comments!!!

at some point i want to make this into a full game with levels and and bosses and everything, but i figured since i have a self-contained demo working i might as well post it

also, any feedback would be appreciated!!!!

Flower and Flame Demo

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Flower and Flame Demo

by AliceNatasha

Cart #flower_and_flame_demo-0 | 2020-07-22 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License

After several tries, I got 2085. I did better when I stopped trying to avoid shots.

Mostly I think the game just needs the things you mentioned. However, I think your patterns of shots could use more complexity and variety. Making the player thread through tighter safezones would also help to make the focus movement object useful.

Looking through your code, two things stand out to me: 1. you seem to be only using integers. 2. your circles don't use trig functions. I would recommend checking whether allowing enemies or bullets to move at .5 speed (in any direction) will break anything. If not, you could replace the long block of make_ebullet() calls with a for loop along the lines of

    for i=0,7 do
        make_ebullet(x,y,cos(i/8),sin(i/8))
    end

There's also things like arcs and randomized blasts that would become available as well, though they could easily make the game too hard if you're aiming for a casual difficulty level.

thanks for the feedback, the trig stuff especially is something i never considered, like i said im not a programmer and im not much into math so i really hack things together with duct tape that could be way more efficient with better implementation of math functions. im gonna probably re-code the whole thing in a more efficient iteration because theres a lot of inefficiencies and bad code even ive been noticing on re-examination.

im especially gonna make sure to experiment with trig functions because that seems like the way to make the fun touhou patterns that i really want. it'd also save a lot of tokens which is good cause if i keep building the game in the way that i have been i'll be wasting a huge amount of tokens and wouldnt be able to implement everything i wanted to.

thanks again for the feedback, i really appreciate it!!!!