itch.io

Looked good.
The difficulty curve in avoiding damage was way too stiff, though. I can imagine this becoming hell to balance with a death/redo system, since you'd need bigger maps or a better perks scalings.
The issues are that you are mainly forced to choose between damage and mobility, and enemies scale faster than you can upgrade, so you either have enough damage to kill them fast and level up fast and little mobility (sentry gatling gameplay) or have enough mobility to dodge things, but no damage and no range and get swarmed by enemies.
In the later stages you are constantly swarmed by enemies even with a high damage and high range setup. And a mixed build of damage and mobility still struggles hard.

As for AI usage, I think you've applied it in a very creative and interesting way! I know the discourse around AI has gotten extremely biased against AI in the creative sector, and I'm personally anti-AI in a sense that I'd hate for AI to completely replace human made art and I extremely dislike that it was built upon stolen works, BUT your blend between cutesy hand drawn art and semi-realistic cartoony style AIgen portraits was a very positive experience overall, reminiscent of Metal Slug's style in a sense and the gameplay was fun, the enemies being pretty damn accurate was very surprising too.

So yeah, good luck with your next project!

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