I'm thrilled to hear the title screen was a hit for you. For simple games like this with unusual movement, I think the title screen is a great opportunity to teach the player, integrating a tutorial in a clean, non-obvious way. I did something similar in my entry last year, but this time the game is simple enough for the title screen to really teach you everything you need to know. I did have a brief thought of disabling death there, but kept it because it's funny, teaches a lesson, and helps show off the really cool sprite-0-hit collision.

Thanks for the kind words about the controls, and I appreciate the feedback about a pause feature. I discuss both in my reply to Matthew Justice further down the page, if you're interested. As for collision, I touched on it above, but I used sprite 0 hit for it and I think it turned out fantastic; it's hard to think of a better use case. Sprite 0 hit has so many limitations that make it a bad tool for object collision and I'm really fortunate it works so well for this game. Having to replicate this in software would be a serious challenge, and less precise collision would really hurt the game's feel. Dodging an obstacle simply by rotating the ship feels great!

I appreciate the kind words! I'm not much of an artist and was worried my basic art here wouldn't land, but I think it might succeed in giving a vector arcade feel, which is very appropriate for the style of game.

You're not the first person to want unlimited lives, and I strongly considered this for an easy mode. I was concerned it would hurt the feeling of progression and achievement as the player masters the game, and worsen the difficulty curve by allowing players to get to the much harder sections when they haven't had sufficient practice yet on the earlier ones. Difficulty was always on my mind in part because my biggest inspiration for this game, Gravitar, failed in the arcades because of the insane difficulty curve new players face. I got a lot of feedback that normal mode feels pretty good after maybe a brief rough start and that it's fine as-is, and I figured people who really wanted unlimited lives would probably be happy enough with saved states. I definitely didn't expect someone to make a Game Genie code for it; that's really cool!

I'm glad the physics worked so well for you! Doing a rotation-based system like this was new for me and I had some issues getting the right scaling for things like aspect ratios and frame rates, but I think it worked out really well in the end. After my experience in last year's competition where I had trouble tuning gravity just right, I ended up going with 8.16 fixed point (16 bits of subpixels) for position and velocity here instead of the usual 8.8, which I think made a big impact in having the angles feel right. Without that precision, there'd be a lot of adjacent angles with identical X or Y components.

Omitting a pause feature was an intentional decision, because I was worried it would be too tempting to abuse it and it might cut the tension too much. As a compromise, I made it so you're perfectly still after respawning even with gravity enabled, and the in-game timer pauses until you start moving again. I'm surprised by the number of requests I've had for a pause feature, and while I'm still not sure it's right for the game, I'm definitely not sure what the right way would be to add it in. Two options I've considered are to have a cooldown after unpausing where you have to wait some amount of time before you can pause again, or requiring that your velocity be low enough on both X and Y to pause. The latter might be harder to abuse (depending on the thresholds), but is much less discoverable and clear. These also present more headaches for me in terms of speedrun timing; speedrunners have requested I change the in-game timer in an update to time deaths, but I plan to still have the timer be paused when you respawn until you move. If you can pause the game, I'd prefer not to time it, but I worry that would enable speedrun exploits of the in-game timer like we're currently seeing with deaths.

I definitely appreciate the feedback!