Incredible work! This is one of the games that sees me wanting to try again and get farther into the wave.
I absolutely love the typing aspect and it’s an interesting skill combination to try and blend with the aiming.
This one is pretty good, so let me suggest some ways to improve the experience further. If you plan on post-jam update that is.
It would be better if the “no tutorial” setting was acknowledged by the game because at first i didn’t even think you had it, i just assumed the tutorial always plays. There are many things that could be done. The tutorial tells you about it, or the second time that you play, that’s when it tells you, maybe even gives you a checkbox to click right then and there. However it is also important to note that you may not have read every single tutorial page. It’d be a good thing if there’s like tutorial progress that can be reset, so you see each page once unless you reset the progress. In addition make sure that clicks don’t happen for 1 second so players don’t accidentally skip the tutorial while shooting. Happened to me once on the big reddish entity, didn’t get to read its name and function. It’d make sense if we could browse the tutorial when not playing, like an index book or something, to get a refresher on-demand without the stress of the wave in-between each page.
In addition it’d be very important for people to be able to know how far they got. Usually this is a score, but you may come up with something more unique. Like stats for the end of the wave that can be shared and compared. I see many people in such games screenshot their stats and post them in the comments to see who can do it best so you’ll probably be getting more engagement out of it too, and it’s just more fun to know exactly how well you did each time. Stats may include words typed, words mistyped, negative words typed, negative words mistyped, enemies killed, time alive, total sanity drained, total sanity replenished, etc. Some games have even gone as far as plotting some of the stats on a graph which i find pretty cool and it’s rather easy to code too. You just need to store an array of values and to render it, you need to know the maximum and minimum value, which will let you properly resize the graph so its range fits the data. (here’s an example from one of my other jam games: https://tomsterbg.itch.io/brushed-dc-motor)
Also it feels like the wave ramps up exponentially. Usually these games would have difficulties or different balance depending on what you’d want. Personally i’d say to rebalance it in a way that it is possible to get really far if you’re skilled, but you might say that a 2-5 minute wave is better, so that should be up to the player to decide via a difficulty choosing system.
Once a difficulty is in place, one may also make it properly, meaning that different mechanics change depending on the difficulty settings. For example, the weapon may have a shorter cooldown when you actually hit something, rewarding consecutive shots, but also this gives a contrast to how it feels when you miss. Or the shooting enemy may shoot more frequently. Or the radar may have a different range (which should be indicated in some way). Or the enemy strafing could be changed to be faster or less predictable if the game is meant to be harder.
Sorry if i’ve gotten carried away, i like to dream! Hope this is useful!