This might be the king of the twin stick shooters right now, in terms of the power fantasy this game provides.
Each capstone upgrade, aside from the less-bad-guys-line gave me a new stool to step up and marvel at my kingdom. Refining, time-per-shard, multiple shard-per-kill. Slowly I watched the cliff crumble and when finally it fell, the game felt great. The clock was now meaningless. I had won.
Or had I? I'm only going to drop one interesting thought here, and I hope it's one you know and agree with! In GMTK jam we, of course, have to try (and in my case fail) to make our games accessible to the average 2-3 minute playtime someone puts in. Often, like here, that means sacrificing the endgame experience to front load the action. Once I won, which was maybe six seven rounds in, all I had left to do was buy every upgrade, which just meant wiggling my mouse and keyboard to try to maximize my fragments-per-second under no duress or time. A little part of me hoped that after five minutes, there'd be some big dangerous boss, and all those hours of clock time I racked up would matter to my health, and when I beat him you'd come to my home, knock on my door, and tell me "congratulations son, you've won". As it's obviously not tuned to be an infinite game, I really think an ending screen, no matter how small, would have nailed this experience.
Now. It is fun. It is so so fun. At first I hated the diamonds, what a waste of left clicks. I tried to avoid reds so I could bunch them together and minimize the travel between their loot. I explored the tech tree, carefully avoiding some upgrades I thought were fillers to dig deep for the game changers. These are all top tier gameplay experiences. I can see you tuned the game to a fun average set of upgrades, and then gave us the option to have 20% more so we got to exerience overcoming your challenge. Intentional or not, it's kudos.
I think this is perfectly tuned for a GTMK Jam / demo. The second column of upgrades are all more interesting than the first, and upon reveal, you can preview and build your excitement for it. I had no issues with the controls, though, I never used the dash and the bomb only for farming massive times at the end. My inputs were responsive and snappy, and in my playtime I didn't encounter any bugs or even unfinished surfaces.
After the jam give me a big guy that spawns painful circles and makes me use up my two hours of clock! Love the work enjoy your day xx