Hi there! Glad to see some detailed feedback for the game here, the more we can get, the better. Glad to see you're enjoying yourself.
I'll see if I cant give a few answers and general responses to some of what you've said here. I made the majority of the enemies and all of the bosses, so that's the aspect I can answer the most on. But I can still help give info on other things too.
....which is going to be a bit annoying to write up. What is with this godforsaken text editor here? This thing is so glitchy is practically is just one giant glitch. Just.... what. I mean, this is almost Youtube levels of bugginess, which is saying something.
Anyway, my obligatory complaint over with, let's get to it.....
From the rooms i've encountered, basic enemy hp seemed fine, and more health on enemy is rarely more fun. Boss that I've encountered however was sitting waaaay too long on one pattern and had only one phase... Then again i had no items at that point, and i forgot that missiles existed, so dunno.
Bosses wont have all that many different patterns. While the design style of the patterns is that of a bullet-hell type (inspired mostly by Cave, because they're great), one way or another, this is not an actual "full" shmup. I dont want the player to have to memorize a really silly number of different patterns or anything like that, and neither does the head developer. On top of that, there are going to be *alot* of bosses. We're going for a huge amount of content here. The boss you mentioned with only one pattern, I think I know which one that is. If it has only one pattern this means one of two things: either A, it was decided that it's complicated/hard enough to only need one pattern so as not to overwhelm the player, or B, I simply havent gotten around to making it's other ones. As this is an alpha, nothing is in a fully completed state. Expect unfinished weirdness. But as I want feedback on patterns and such, even if a boss is not finished, it is added to what is currently playable so long as the finished parts of it are functioning correctly. This also means that some patterns on both bosses and normal enemies are going to recieve plenty of changes over time as the alpha/beta/whatever continues.
There will probably though be exceptions to the low-pattern-count rule though. But I cant say anything more about that right now. The stuff that relates to is still just in the concept phase and there's been no concrete decisions on it.
Some enemy type just wandered around firing very short range shots in random directions, is it intentionally nearly harmless?
Yes. There are enemies that are meant to just be the "Goombas" of the game, particularly in the early levels. Of course, right now most enemies and such arent set to seed only on specific levels, so things are really all over the place right now. But yeah, there'll be a very wide range of difficulty levels on the different enemies and bosses.
Anyway, done my second run and completed all 5 floors apparently. Normal might be waaay too easy, at least for me...
Right now "normal" is the only one that's fully active. The bosses actually have full "hard mode" patterns... my design style typically leads me to create things that are *really* hard, and I cant overstate just how difficult I mean by that. If you've heard of Mushihime-sama, I'm used to games like that one, and I mean something like it's infamous Ultra mode, which I've completed. Even holding back ALOT, the original patterns for all of the bosses were deemed as much too difficult to at all be in normal mode, and have been restricted to Hard and above, while normal mode has much toned-down versions of the original patterns. Eventually, each individual difficulty will likely have it's own altered set of patterns. I'd meant to have the current set of bosses fully differentiated by now, but ran into screwy issues while doing that, so they're not active on Hard mode yet. Currently, Lady Staccato and Shrapnel Rose are the only ones with tougher patterns that are actually active, since those were just made and I havent taken the time to create easier versions yet.
But yeah, this game isnt meant to be super difficult like your typical shmup is... it's meant to be playable by a wide range of people of all skill levels. I think I can guarantee the higher levels of difficulty will certainly be up there in terms of difficulty though. The highest one in particular, I intend on making it hard enough to challenge myself, which should be... interesting. Right now, even the two "hard" ones, Lady Staccato and Shrapnel Rose, are still way too easy for me (Rose in particular takes next to no effort, and I dont use safe spots for any of these when playing the game, I sit in front of them), so that should give some indication of what the really nasty versions might be like.
The tough part though is making sure the game doesnt have wacky difficulty spikes or things like that in modes that they're not suited for. If you ever have any specific thoughts on the difficulty of any individual enemy or boss, by all means, post it on the forums or on the Mantis bug-tracker if you like. It helps alot.
though boss on floor 5(I think it was "Mirror"?) spawned on top on me for some reason.
....what? That shouldnt be happening. Ugh. I'll look into that. I cant imagine what the heck might be causing it. I probably left some damn typo somewhere or entered a wrong number in some important spot. Bah.
There were some cases of "I've just cleared this room" with 2 exactly same rooms adjacent to each other with exactly same enemies, probably has more to do with amount of rooms in game but maybe there could be special check to avoid that?
That'll solve itself as the number of available rooms increases. There's only so many right now. But yeah, it's a little annoying when it does that. Just part of the fun of alpha testing I guess
I liked the "Rose" boss, was actually difficult unlike others(At least until you find semi-safespots above-below, which i hope arent intentional).
....argh argh argh. That keeps happening. Indeed, they're not intentional. They're a result of me being really spacey and not noticing the problem while testing them myself. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll see about doing something about it, though not necessarily right away, I've other priorities to deal with first. Probably.
And lastly, if you should find bugs that you want to report, or have any specific suggestions or anything, it can help to report them here: https://arcengames.com/mantisbt/my_view_page.php The head developer in particular often doesnt have all that much time to browse the forums here, since he's got a TON of stuff to do, but everyone on the dev team will notice things posted on Mantis. Though, by all means, if you think something warrants some discussion, feel free to post it on the forums here.
