Read all four devlogs, the shrug-at-the-camera after trapping himself is a great beat. On your playtester's "seals don't read as the goal": in a top-down survivors-like I would give the seals one persistent signal (a slow pulse plus an outline in the layer's accent colour) and drop it once broken, so the eye can find them mid-chaos. For the XP "21/92", a thin bar with the number inside it usually reads faster than a bare fraction, and a short flash when it fills makes level-up feel earned. I also ran the web build for a minute: I dropped a bomb on the first layer and walked into my own cross, and what I saw was the orange tile outlines, the "OUCHIE!" caption with sweat drops, and two hearts gone. The tile telegraph reads well. The thing I would try there is 2-3 frames of hit-stop plus a small camera kick on the blast itself, so a hit feels heavier than the caption alone. Happy to sketch the seal pulse as a small Godot shader snippet if you want it.
Thanks so much for playing and for such specific notes! Glad the shrug landed; he’s become my favourite little guy to animate.
All three ideas are going in right now: seals get a slow pulse plus an outline in the layer’s colour that drops once broken, the XP counter becomes a bar with the number inside and a flash when it fills, and a blast hit gets a couple of frames of hit-stop and a camera kick. You’re right that “OUCHIE!” alone undersells it.
No need to write the shader, I’ve got the pulse covered, but if you feel like sketching it anyway I’d love to compare approaches. I’ll post a before/after once the new build is up