This is a nice game - solid gameplay loop that looks, feels and sounds pretty good overall, but with a few glaring technical and gameplay issues that hold it back from being great.

• Technical
  • The game does not conform to the 160x144 resolution limitation for this jam. Several UI elements, including text, appear to be scaled to the upscaled rendering resolution rather than the base 160x144.
  • The game does not conform to the four-colour limit for this jam. The default Godot background colour is visible as well as the four game colours, and the UI text has some anti aliasing that should not have been enabled
  • The game does not conform to the controller limitations for this jam. With a controller, the joypad lets you modulate your walk speed in an analogue fashion by holding it back more or less, which is inherently more than eight buttons.
• Mechanical
  • The shop took me a couple of tries to parse - I faded into the shop, hit a button to shoot because I was focused on killing the enemy in front of me, accidentally bought something and was returned to gameplay before I realized what was going on. I feel that it should've A) used a more conventional control scheme, B) let the player decide when to enter the shop (you still had two buttons free - start/select would've been perfect for this) and C) used stronger audiovisual feedback to let the player know when they're leaving instead of relying on a timer.
  • The player hitbox is absolutely enormous. Normally these things are slightly narrower than the player to give some leeway in dodging, but this hitbox extends to the player's floating orb and then-some. You can hardly share the screen with one of the larger enemies before getting dinked for half your health.
  • The health feels like it should've been icons instead of a number, with how big the damage numbers are and how small the font is. The little guys do 25 and the big guys do 50, this could've been 4 hearts on the HUD and it'd be more legible.

But besides that, I think the game is well designed overall. It's simple but it's a tried and true formula that works and had me mostly enjoying the rounds I played. Keep up the good work!

The game's pretty cute. I really like the sound effects. Having the gun shoot slightly above was a little jarring at first but got used to it.

Menu controls felt confusing, but the game UI is awesome. Missing feedback on enemy kills, and the music needs more impact.