This game has been on my radar for some time and now that I've been messing around with the demo I'm even more excited for the full release! Really love the visuals and the bullet patterns are engaging. Stage 1 boss is really fun too.
I don't know how the score works since this demo doesn't has any, but considering the lock-on mechanic and the fact that the demo's boss has many destructible parts, it seems like destroying boss parts will be part of score play. In some shmups this can feel like a chore but in this case I had a lot of fun milking this boss!
Also, I found a kind of silly safe spot on the third pattern. If you destroy all the left side of the boss and then you hug the right side of the screen after the second pattern, the boss will move in front of you making its right side go out of screen, leaving you with only the pink bullets which are static. You can see me doing it in the video below.
Only minor complaint about the boss is that after destroying all its parts, that last pattern goes on for a little too long for me, and since the pattern doesn't get harder or anything, it can feel like the fight is over but the boss keeps going for some reason.maybe making the last pattern grow in intensity as it goes on will help? This way players who don't care about boss milking won't be seeing the harder pattern since they will be focusing on the main body of the boss, destroying it before that point. Again, this is just me assuming that boss milking by destroying parts is going to be a thing, so just disregard this if that's not the case.
Campaign mode also looks interesting. Breaking the stage into chunks that can be played and completed individually is an interesting idea and I can see it being appealing for people new to the genre. It also looks like it can be a very useful way to practice bosses.
As far as negatives go, i really don't have many. Obviously is a work in progress so stuff like sound design and the lack of a visual for the bomb can't be held against it. I can only think of one thing that kind of bugged me and that was the ships visibility.
A lot of the background in this first stage is gray, which can make the ship kind of hard to keep track of. This is somewhat alleviated by the visible hitbox, but even then is really small and can get easily lost when there are a lot of bullets. Cave tends to make their visible hitboxes huge (Deathsmiles, DFK, SDOJ, Futari) even if the actual hitbox is really small, which helps to keep track of where you are on screen with your peripheral vision.
Maybe this is just a stage 1 issue and other stages make the ship pop out a bit more or maybe is just a me problem, in which case feel free to disregard this comment lol
overall, this looks like a really interesting project with a lot of potential and I'm really excited to see how the full release will be like!