itch.io

It's hard for me to articulate but I guess you should be thinking, okay, well the Primary Goal of the game is to get to the end of the stage, and then the Secondary Goal (for advanced players and replays) is to get a high score, right? The question then becomes "what kind of play am I trying to reward?"; for example as it is right now there's little incentive to really kill enemies unless you're trying to get a high score, so the primary and secondary goals are a little TOO disjointed (in most shmups your primary goal involves killing enemies because killing enemies is satisfying and if you don't you get overwhelmed by bullets and die before making it to the end of the stage). So what you could do is make enemies a little more involved somehow (maybe have enemies try to target you more or have you need to meet a quota of defeated enemies to proceed in the stage or something). This is, in a basic way, what I mean by the focus thing. I could play the game in my "cowardly way" doing hit and runs and I didn't feel like I was rewarded but I also didn't feel like I was being punished either, so I sat in this limbo where I felt like the game wasn't pushing me to get the most out of it. I don't have much experience with 3D plane games though so I can't suggest much more "detailed" advice unfortunately, hahah, but I hope I was able to be helpful in some way.