Heaven Slash by FireSlash
Overview
Heaven Slash is a retro PC98 game in the vein of Crime Crackers; meant to feel like an old doujin game dug out of someone's closet and machine translated for the western audience to enjoy.
Gameplay wise it's a mix of Crime Crackers and Ikaruga; the E key switches between Avery and Ouka. Avery uses long range blue attacks, and takes no damage from blue projectiles. Ouka is a short range melee character and takes no damage from red projectiles and melee attacks. Similarly, enemies take significantly reduced damage from same color attacks.
In short: - Blue hair girl absorbs blue bullets and deals more damage to enemies that shoot red bullets or are melee. - White hair girl absorbs red bullets and deals more damage to enemies that shoot blue bullets. - Each level requires 3 keys

Controls
- WASD to move.
- E switched between Avery and Ouka
- Spacebar shoots
| Youtube | https://spitko.itch.io/heaven-slash |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/heaven-slash |
Ratings
| Overall | 235th | 3.953⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 539th | 3.567⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1076th | 3.065⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1502th | 2.707⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 143th | 4.333⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 70th | 4.167⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 239th | 3.935⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
This is game is, dare I say it, based.
I really liked the retro-game style, reminded me of the old wolfenstein3D or quake :)
Good job here !
In retrospect I probably needed a forcing function to get players to engage enemies; either making them block the player, or having them drop the keycards instead of being in the map already.
Thanks for the feedback!
Also since a few people have mentioned the input limitations (mouselook, strafe), that was an intentional choice for better or worse. We were actually going to make it even more convoluted (keyboard aim on top of keyboard movement) but in the end settled for this middle ground. Ultimately we wanted the game to play slowly and encourage a more methodical approach, but it didn't quite pan out that way in the end.
Gameplay is confusing if you don't read the instructions (wow who would've thought you need to read that), and even then it's pretty frustrating and not very fun. Too easy to lose HP, hard to dodge, and most importantly, it *feels* bad/clunky. I guess it's ok if it's for the sake of staying true to the inspiration. Another big deterrent for me was the confusing samey layouts (which I later learned were procedurally generated), they're a nightmare to navigate with my poor spatial awareness that heavily relies on points of reference, and there are no points of reference here, just rectangular rooms and corridors.
The damage type the enemies are weak too being dependent on their bullet color instead of their actual color is also very confusing, especially when it cites Ikaruga in the description where the mechanic is different and much more straightforward.
A couple of ideas to improve upon a stellar project:
1. Show the number of keys in inventory.
I picked up three things that I definitely thought were the keys (looked like an SD card) but the door didn't open. Then I found another, I think, so I guess that wasn't the key after all. Maybe just a weapons upgrade? Were the CD-ROMs the keys?
2. Change the color of the enemies to be consistent with the weakpoint system. The enemies that fired red bullets were blue, so I thought the red character was strong against them only to have her get decimated. Then the red-colored robots were the ones shooting the blue bullets and weak against the red girl's abilities...anyway that part confused me.
But overall great job. One of my favorite's of the jam so far.
Amusingly perf was a big issue through a lot of the dev process, I spent a solid 6 hours getting the framerate above 60; but once I had a breakthrough I ended up breaking past 800fps with vsync off in native builds. Ultimately there's just not a lot of geometry or textures here, so once you get the draw call count down it's blazing fast.
The CDs were indeed the keys. The other items you saw were ammo boxes for the special weapons.
The weakpoint system color issue has been contentious and is a mix of oversight and not thinking through ikaruga's visual design. It came to light shortly after the jam was over, at which point it was too late to fix. I've tried to clarify the current system in the description but it's going to confuse people unfortunately.
Thanks for the feedback!
Congratulations on a finished game :)
Congratulations for that!
Great art and music.
The player can not move to side is weird, some times I needed to avoid bullets but I just turned arround.
Good job :smile:
Overall though, I still loved it! Great job on the game!
I don't have a lot of remarks since it's a very good entry already, but maybe there should be some dialogs that pop at some moments during the level (that don't interrupt the gameplay)to indicate that all the keys were found, or that one character is down for example, to further immerse the player
Impressive work !
Also, two questions. What's up with the missing .gif? And why can I start the game and advance through dialogue with a controller's A button, but I cannot use a controller for gameplay?