Pretty fun game. The only beef I have with it is that it is too hard to control. I got far into the child penguin stage before I died and gave up. It would have been 10x better with WASD + mouse controls.
Neat, though steering and firing at the same time is hard. One thing that bugged me is that drop rate for 1UPs is too high - during a single round I could easily get like 5 lives before dying.
Loving this game. can't say it's too complex, but the turning feels right, the graphics have a minor realism to it; i guess its the shading. The audio is fitting.
One of the best games I've played yet! I would have liked to see more colour in the enemies, and pressing 'z' 120 times when giving the fish seems a little pointless. But other than that, great fun!
Aww! Penguins are rad. Very simple, but I did like that there was a low punishment for failure, with a "game over" only resulting in a level restart and no serious penalty before that.
Hi, this is Vector from the Victory Garden team! (posting under Solifuge's account)
Man, I love a cute danmaku game. The idea is great, it's adorable, I like the pace. Touhou controls are fine, though the penguin rotates in a way that's difficult to maneuver. Music and SFX are a bit unbalanced, too, while the backing track didn't quite seem to suit your mood.
Thing is, though, I can't really understand why I was collecting fish--I got to 46/25 and nothing in particular happened (I'm looking at the comments below--it seems that you're supposed to feed the penguin on the surface, but there's no indicator that you'd be able to do that).
Pre-post edit:
Okay, I went back and played a bit longer, getting to the baby penguin level, which I probably played about 5 times. Most of the jellyfish are clustered on the edge of the screen, hence most of the fish and powerups they spit out, and a hell of a lot of bullets. However, you have an ocean current there. Getting blown into danmaku over and over again was really frustrating, so I'd say the number one thing is, for this adorable game--do something else about the edges, perhaps? Otherwise, I love the theme, the general setup, the concept. I got pretty involved in playing! So, thank you for the experience.
Man that second level was tough, but helping the penguin to build his family was the perfect incentive to keep going right to the end. There was no way I was going to let the baby penguin down!
Really enjoyed that. Great job. If you could port this to the Vita and add twin stick controls, I would 100% buy it. :)
+ fun and simple + challenging levels, with a nice story (life's tough if you're a penguin mom) - gathering large amounts of fish gets tedious after a while
realllyyyy liked this. good energy system, diagonal spray shots took skill, liked the little beating heart hitbox. didn't understand why bullet-time was in there though (seemed unlimited?) so i just didn't use it. also think it'd be good if your dash could hurt enemies (either that or you die touching them, felt weird just dashing into them and nothing happening)
I found this one hilarious. The giant fish that fired out huge blasts of energy like a Megaman enemy made me laugh much, much harder than I should have. Good music. Very enjoyable game play, if not a bit repetitive.
After I know the dash trick the game feels easier. While I used to think the game is hard, now I find the level difficulty balance is very well done and challenges players in a good way!
Fun, and it has plot progression (of a sort)! The hitbox feels a bit big for a typical danmaku game, which makes it pretty hard to dodge some of the burst attacks.
You're supposed to use the "dash" button to get out of the hairiest situations (you can dash to destroy bullets). It's mentioned in the controls popup, but in retrospect should have made a in-game text popup to make sure it wasn't missable.
Controls are a bit floaty - which makes sense, but makes it hard to squeeze through gaps. Felt like more of a problem with the mouse controls, actually - keyboard ended up being easier to me.
The surfacing mechanic puts a nice spin to the idea, and takes away a lot of the frustration.
That was fun! At first I walked up to the other penguin who said "click" but I was empty. Maybe it should say something else in that case... Anyway, good work!
Comments53
Well done!
Man, I love a cute danmaku game. The idea is great, it's adorable, I like the pace. Touhou controls are fine, though the penguin rotates in a way that's difficult to maneuver. Music and SFX are a bit unbalanced, too, while the backing track didn't quite seem to suit your mood.
Thing is, though, I can't really understand why I was collecting fish--I got to 46/25 and nothing in particular happened (I'm looking at the comments below--it seems that you're supposed to feed the penguin on the surface, but there's no indicator that you'd be able to do that).
Pre-post edit:
Okay, I went back and played a bit longer, getting to the baby penguin level, which I probably played about 5 times. Most of the jellyfish are clustered on the edge of the screen, hence most of the fish and powerups they spit out, and a hell of a lot of bullets. However, you have an ocean current there. Getting blown into danmaku over and over again was really frustrating, so I'd say the number one thing is, for this adorable game--do something else about the edges, perhaps? Otherwise, I love the theme, the general setup, the concept. I got pretty involved in playing! So, thank you for the experience.
Great audio and storytelling (I consider this growing the child thing a story).
Really enjoyed that. Great job. If you could port this to the Vita and add twin stick controls, I would 100% buy it. :)
+ challenging levels, with a nice story (life's tough if you're a penguin mom)
- gathering large amounts of fish gets tedious after a while
didn't understand why bullet-time was in there though (seemed unlimited?) so i just didn't use it.
also think it'd be good if your dash could hurt enemies (either that or you die touching them, felt weird just dashing into them and nothing happening)
Like the animations...
The game's probably pretty damn hard without it!
The surfacing mechanic puts a nice spin to the idea, and takes away a lot of the frustration.
Good work.
It is addictive, it has a good mechanic, and it has penguins! What else could it need? :P