Some feedback after playing. I assume you're already planning on it, but definitely add game pad support. For many players like myself, playing on keyboard is miserable. I like the motif you're going for, not many shmups with this kind of theme, so it's good to see the genre branch out from the usual fare of spaceships. planes, anime girls, and the like. The parallax effect in the background is appreciated as a nice callback to one of the things that stood out about the genre in the late 80's with arcade games and the 16-bit consoles. Bullet visibility is high, but bullet speeds and patterns are difficult to contend with. Obviously in the context of the demo itself, you're just counting hits you take vs enemies eliminated, but as the game develops I would definitely recommend slowing down bullets so patterns are more readable, and giving the character a readable hit box. Another attack vector would be good as well, whether that's some sort of "bomb" for clearing enemies and bullets, another weapon or attack type you can earn or power up somehow, or a technique you can enable by earning meter by taking out enemies. Something to spice up the basic formula. I do appreciate that the character runs on the ground if you move all the way down. That's not super common with "flying people" shmups, so it's a nice touch.
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Sorry for the delayed reply, but thank you so much for listening to the podcast! We have a Discord server now as well, so if you want more players to try your demo and give you feedback, I'd be happy to send you a link. We have a very good community, and a couple other devs that hang out in the server that would very likely swap ideas with you and provide feedback from their own development perspective as well.
I just tried the demo, and figured I would offer a few thoughts.
1. The ship's hit box is very large, even for a game that's targeting the PS1/Saturn era as its style. It almost feels like it's larger than the ship itself, which feels bad when you aren't even grazing an enemy or projectile, and you get taken out. I'd suggest cinching that up a bit so that it's at least the sprite itself only, or perhaps a little smaller.
2. The initial shot type feels very weak, especially against the initial batch of enemies that take several shots to kill. By contrast, when I got the boss and obtained a laser weapon, even though it still took a bit to take out the boss, that weapon felt way more powerful. The weapon system also seems a tad esoteric. That might be what you're going for, which is cool. It's just not super clear what the upgrade paths might be, so I would say keep that in mind as development progresses.
3. I love that you're channeling the Einhander vibes with this, but I'd caution against going too hard in that direction, lest the game gets labeled as little more than a copycat. But the 1st stage here feeling a bit like stage 2 of Einhander was a nice atmospheric touch, and certainly something players of my age bracket will appreciate.
4. On a minor technical note, when I was done with the demo and entering my name in the high score table, no matter what button I pushed to select "OK" in that screen, it never actually selected OK, it just went back to name entry. It wasn't until OK was highlighted and I hit the Enter key that the score saved. I've seen this in a couple other games, and your score table looks exactly like those, so I suspect it's something inherent to the engine you're using to create the game. Still, good to be aware of this as the game progresses.
All in all, this is a solid start with a lot of promise. I look forward to seeing where you go with it!
I just played the demo, and thought I would offer some feedback. I'm not sure what it is, but this game is visually difficult for me to parse. The look reminds me of a 90's Amiga or PC shooter, with a bit of a slick, shiny style, and a bit of flash. Somehow that clashes with the fast action danmaku-lite flow of the game, at least at first blush. Bullets are brightly colored and *should* be easy to see, but for some reason the graphical style makes it harder to parse. It also seemed like maybe the game felt just a tad stuttery to me. My setup isn't the latest & greatest, but it's not bad: I have an Intel i7-4770 running at 3.4 Ghz, 16GB RAM on board, and a NVidia GTX 1080 video card, so I assume this should run buttery smooth. But I think the flashiness of the graphic design may work against the shmup game play approach you're going for, at least insofar as things are harder to read, patterns more difficult to discern, and I end up getting hit by stuff I didn't even realize was already on top of me. Some of it might be that I'm playing on a large 4K TV, so while the play field is only about a 1/3 of the width of the screen, it's still quite tall, so I may have better luck on a smaller monitor. Either way, I found myself struggling just to figure out what was going on at some level, and wonder if taking just a bit of the spit-shine polish off the visuals might make things easier to distinguish from one another. I like the general idea you're going for, and I find multiple bosses during each stage a cool idea, not just a sub-boss and final boss, so that's a fun design choice. But it feels like you're trying to make a Psikyo game with a distinctly 90's Amiga inspired presentation, and the visual style is definitely making the game harder to read (at least for me) than I feel it needs to be. Just my initial impressions after a couple runs.