The final major patch for the DEMO!
Summary
A few weeks ago, the demo for No Need for Flowers was a part of Nextfest. This event was a complete success, and most importantly, the countless detailed feedback from streams, videos, emails, comments, and people filling out the feedback form was extremely insightful. It shined light on all the parts of the game that people resonated with and all the parts that were confusing or needed a bit more polish.
After this influx of feedback, I put together a big list of things I wanted to improve before the full release, which was shared in the previous update post. Well, I went ahead and made all those changes and have added them to the demo in this final major update (v3.0)!
WARNING!!
Due to the various major changes made, old replays will be de-synced and should be deleted. There is now an indicator to show which replays are out dated, which will make this simpler.
It is strongly advised that you delete your scores. You will be prompted to do this upon updating, but you could also just say no to this prompt... But, like, please don't.
Counter spells are easier!
• Poly from 18 to 30 frames.
• Esther from 12 to 25 frames.
• ???? from 15 to 25 frames.
• Updated Help Menu to reflect these new values.
Poly is better!!
• Poly's second pair of orbitals are always active, independent of your power level.
• Redistributed Poly's damage values so that the homing shot contributes to a much higher percentage of her total DPS output.
• Doubled the size of Poly's non-homing shot hitbox to fix a major oversight that caused her to do less damage at max power. Had the additional benefit of making Poly easier to do good damage with in general.
• Poly's spell now does ~400% more damage at max power. If you want the specific numbers (damage per frame at 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 power): 1.2 | 0.4 | 0.3 | 0.2. For reference of how significant this is, here are Esther's stats: 0.6 | 0.3 | 0.2 | 0.1. The philosophy behind this change is to give players who die a lot or play on Easy (which has way more power pickups) a method to cheat the hard sections of the game if they use Poly. But you're probably thinking, doesn't this make Hard Mode cheatable too? In the full game, no... You'll see why soon (not sorry).
Item collection made simpler!
✿ New QoL mechanic: All items on screen are automatically collected if you don't shoot for 1/2 a second.
• Every character's collection line is now the same, at 40% from the top of the play area.
• Pickup collection range was increased on all characters from 64x64 to 80x80.
Blue stars made simpler!
• Blue star pickups no longer factor y value into score calculation and will always display their number in blue, unless it is max value, in which it will be rainbow.
• Their calculation is now (BASE_VALUE * (480 + TENSION)).
New QoL options!
• Added an option to show your numerical power value.
• Added an accessibility option to disable screenshake.
• Replays now save your game version and will display a warning if the version does not match the current build you are playing.
Difficulty improvements
• Changed player invincibility frames on hit from 120 frames to 180 frames.
• Player now has 1 additional second of invincibility after using a spell.
• Changed continues on Normal difficulty from 3 to 6 (there is still some bad programming that limits the potential of using multiple in one stage though, sorry).
• After using a continue, the player's life counter will be set to (STARTING_LIVES + CONTINUES_USED), meaning the game will become slightly easier each time. Note: Starting lives are unchanged (5 on Easy and 2 on Normal and Hard).
Tension improvements
• Increased tension gained from seconds left on boss timer: Poly 3 to 5, Esther 6 to 10.
• Tension bonus for boss spell clears is no longer affected by whether you used a spell.
Misc. improvements
• Increased the dialogue auto-scroll timer from 5 seconds to 15 (this functionality exists to prevent making an infinitely large replay file, please understand...).
• The dialogue skip prompt is now visible during all dialogue scenes, so long as you have beaten that particular stage.
• That one fake crash has been removed and replaced with a hard reset.
• The secret stage re-trigger event no longer affects the music pitch.
• The secret stage forces you into Easy on the first playthrough.
• Some parts of the Help Menu were made much more explicit, and a section for the "item magnet" mechanic was added along with the separation of pink and blue star sections.
• There is a skip prompt on the intro cutscene if you have seen it at least once now.
Graphical improvements
• Made the animation that happens before the dialogue auto-scrolls more obvious (starts 3 entire seconds before, arrow blinks faster, colors are brighter).
• Character select menu attack descriptions are a brighter color.
• The warning exclamation points that appear at the top and bottom of the play area are now larger in most instances.
• Made the grid background that is used in various parts of the game larger, because it was ugly, and not in a charming way.
• Replaced the background effect in Boss Practice with something less oppressive. This will likely be replaced with something better in the future.
• Bestiary has arrow indicators on the horizontal menu now.
• Now when you get hit, the last life in your life meter turns dark, and if you can use a spell, your power bar lights up.
Improvements to boss fights (like, in general)
• The time before the boss nonspell starts has been increased from 1 second to 1.5 seconds.
• Bosses will have a charge up animation 1 second before their nonspell starts, and is accompanied by a warning sound if you are too close.
• Major Hard Mode change: Life pieces no longer individually drop after clearing a boss phase. Instead, end-of-stage bosses will now drop 5 upon defeat. The reason for this change is to account for the increased counter spells timing.
• If you fail a boss's Last Stand Spell, you will no longer receive a Perfect Clear (because it didn't make sense).
Things I added/changed but then removed after testing
• (None of these are important, feel free to disregard).
• Added functionality to show numerical lives value, but I disabled it because it makes the UI look ugly (it takes 5 life pieces to get a life, and at 4, a drippy thing appears below the heart being filled). This may be replaced with something more explicit in the future, but this is what it is right now.
• Added an indicator in the UI when you are invulnerable. Removed it because it was kind of ugly.
• Added a telegraph that would draw a line to explicitly show where Lotus's flood bullets will go but disabled it because it looked ugly.
• Added a line to show where Esther's Helix Bolt spell would shoot, but it felt sort of overstimulating, so it was removed.
• Are you seeing a trend with these?
Specific boss changes
Snapdragon (boss)
• All of Snapdragon's nonspells shoot closer to her sprite now.
• HP values of nonspell phases slightly increased to account for Poly's increased homing shot damage.
• Nonspell 1 timer reduced from 30 to 20.
• Split Paths timer reduced from 60 to 30.
• Nonspell 2 timer is now 25, unless you are playing Hard, in which case it is 20.
• Misdirection timer reduced from 60 to 45.
• Frenzy Fog timer reduced from 60 to 40.
Lily
• Nonspell 1 timer reduced from 25 to 20.
• Nonspell 1, Lily no longer moves on Easy, and her range of movement has been greatly limited on Normal.
• Leap Frog timer reduced from 40 to 30.
• Leap Frog, Lily no longer moves on Easy, and her range of movement has been greatly limited on Normal.
Lotus
• Nonspell 1 timer reduced from 30 to 20.
• Waterspout timer reduced from 60 to 30.
• Nonspell 2 timer reduced from 30 to 20.
• Flash Flood spell timer reduced from 60 to 45.
• Sinkhole timer reduced from 60 to 50.
Esther (boss)
• Helix Bolt timer reduced from 60 to 32.
• Lightning Ram timer reduced from 60 to 45.
• Lightning Ram, HP increased to account for Poly's homing attack doing more damage.
Poly (boss)
• Sacred Flare timer reduced from 60 to 32.
• Holy Inferno timer reduced from 60 to 45.
Specific stage changes
Stage 1
• All enemies have increased HP to account for Poly's homing attack being stronger.
Stage 2
• Fixed the awkward timing at the end of the stage if you defeat the enemies extremely fast.
Stage 3 (as Poly)
• Less power is dropped by enemies in the first half of the stage (around 1.2 less, specifically).
• The sin wave shooter that chases you does a bright charge-up animation before it starts shooting now. It also makes a charge-up sound.
Stage 3 (as Esther)
• Made the 10 pink enemies near the end of the stage appear faster as to not accidentally lure you to the center of the screen where the fire spawner that kills you is.
• If you stand on top of the fire spawner that kills you in the center of the screen during the final wave, it screams at you, exclamation points appear, and a bright charge-up animation plays, letting you know that it will, in fact, kill you.
• Fixed the awkward pause on the final wave if there are no bullets on screen.
Bug fixes
• Fixed a bug that made Poly's homing shots not change their sprite correctly when homing on bosses specifically.
• Fixed a bug where after using a counter spell during a boss spell phase, the spell bonus tick down would be inaccurate sometimes.
• Fixed an error where window dragging was disabled on Windows 10 for some reason.
• Fixed an incredibly annoying bug that would suddenly max out the music volume upon entering and exiting the data delete menu.
• Fixed an extremely minor tension desync on replays that would occur when bullets were turned into bulletscore stars, most notably after using a spell with Esther.
• Corrected a graphical error that caused the Stage 2 flood sequence bullets to be partially visible while they were inactive.
• Removed all remaining instances of Practice Mode being referred to as "Mirage Mode" in other menus (the name changed right before the public demo release, missed a few).
• Fixed a bug that would cause your shooting sound effect to keep playing during dialogue scenes under rare circumstances.
• In Hard, Esther's double-helix shooter, which appears right after she says "Give it up, ''priestess''! I've got you cornered!", is supposed to do that, it isn't a bug. This exists solely to bother people, and is clearly working exactly as intended.
Thoughts...
(In relation to the changes made, and various things about the game as it is so far)
Items
If you've played a Touhou game before, you will likely see the inspiration of how the score items function in NNFF. But after watching how people interact with the game, I have decided to simplify everything by removing the y-value from score calculation, because honestly, forcing players to stay at the top of the screen to maximize score makes no sense within the greater flow of the gameplay and level design. It would also especially bother people in stage 5 if it remained this way (you'll, uh, see what I mean soon). Additionally, I felt like there should be another way to collect items, especially for Poly players who have them all across the screen due to her homing shot, so I went ahead and added that feature where you automatically collect items after stopping shooting for a bit.
Bosses
Something that I noticed was that some players tend to get stuck on certain boss phases for way too long with no escape. To fix this, I lowered all the boss timers to give people who don't care about score a break. Also, I often saw that players continuously get sniped by bosses while trying to collect items as Poly (not so much Esther) after their spell phases. Her collection line is much lower now, and there's that new item magnet method now, so this should no longer be an issue for most players. There are now also several visual and audio warnings to indicate that the boss will start shooting again for extra security.
Tension system
I am personally very proud of the tension system, even though it has the potential to be slightly routing-heavy for people trying to optimize the game. If you play the game normally without trying to cheat the systems, you'll still end up with an extremely high score as long as you're good at all the important mechanics: aiming at enemies, bombing intelligently, collecting items, grazing, defeating bosses quickly, etc. It's been left pretty much untouched in this update, but since I changed a lot of the boss timers to be shorter, I went ahead and boosted tension earned from time left. The tension penalty for using a spell on a boss spell phase (getting +50 instead of +250 after clear) has been removed as well to leave room for imperfection, since you'll be losing a large amount of score anyway from the bonus either being failed or halved.
Future plans
This is going to be the final major system rework and patch for the DEMO. I'm pretty happy with how the game feels and personally think all the mechanics are fun as they currently are. Any more changes from this version to the full game (first three stages and mechanics) will be very minor. Also, if I keep spending all this time redoing stuff, I'll never get around to actually finishing the game. My time to work on NNFF is decently limited, so I need to be careful about what I choose to use it on if I want to hit my (secret) deadline. Still, it feels important to put in all this extra polish work. I just really want people to have as good an experience as possible.
... One more thing. I will be announcing a special event in either December or January. The details of it still need to be worked out, but it's going to be a competition with prizes. Whenever it's ready to share, the details will be shared in an announcement post on Steam, itch.io, and on the official NNFF social media accounts.
To see more development updates and announcements like this, make sure to wishlist & follow!