Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
Before I dive into proper feedback, I want to let you know I had issues getting started with your game. Sometimes it would open in full screen and sometimes it would open in "window." When in full screen, I couldn't make it switch to the monitor I normally play games on as it would instead just move a white window over and keep the game on the wrong monitor, nor could I minimize it to get access to the various things it was now hiding to move them. While it was in "window," it took up not even a quarter of the full screen size, making text impossible to read, and I also couldn't get it into full screen. So yea, something weird there.
While this looks like it's a good ol' shoot-em-up experience, what comes out is anything but that. Where as schmups often make use of tight controls for the player and planned forms of attack for the computer, the controls on this see it that momentum never goes away while every aspect of enemies is just random: where they spawn, how their attacks work and even what the enemies are! This can lead to a frustrating experience. For the player to change directions, they need to first fight against the momentum pushing them a specific way. Only then can they move how they want. Meanwhile, the random behaviour of enemies means that the player can never really plan ahead for what's coming as that will be different any time. While it IS still possible to make the experience good by making enemies easy to dispatch, putting more focus on just hitting an enemy once rather than having to whittle their health down, that's not the direction you took this. Instead, your ship has laughably weak weapons, taking numerous shots from the start of the game to kill the first enemy you encounter. While the ship has a decent fire rate, the size of projectiles is also very small. In fact, everything is very small, making it incredibly difficult to hit enemies.
To compensate for all of this, you have an upgrade system so you can improve your damage. Unfortunately, this also has problems with the first being that the currency you need to upgrade your weapons is the same currency you lose if you die, something that happens a lot with the current systems in play. Then there's the slow rate of acquiring said currency. To get your first weapon upgrade, you need 100 star dust. You get 1 per enemy killed, plus another 10 if an enemy drops collectable star dust. If I had to guess, these star dust drops have between a 5% and 10% drop rate. However, much like everything else these collectables are also tiny and you have to touch them with the ship to collect them. Meanwhile, the amount of star dust you're likely to get on the first wave isn't even enough to get that first weapon upgrade unless you actively leave after said first wave and replay it and leave again.
Lastly, there's another thing that the player can collect. Using an alternate weapon, players can destroy rocks on the surface of the world to collect gems. I honestly don't know what these gems do just yet as I only had 20% research into them when I quit the game to write this. However, like many things in this game, even these rocks are out to screw the player over as touching them before they're destroyed counts as damage.
Everything I described is the experience I had with the game. The furthest I ever got was to the third wave where the sheer number of the small, wriggling enemies made it impossible for me to get far as I couldn't destroy them fast enough. Honestly, once I saw how many there were I knew that a lot of my feedback was going to feel negative. However, I still feel like a lot of this can be dealt with while not having to completely throw away everything in your vision.
First, instead of momentum always staying until the player deals with it, make it that the ship loses momentum over time. Yes, I know it's a space ship and lack of gravity and yadda yadda, but the player can always think "Ok, the ship has a system that works to counter drifting momentum." Having momentum fade off will make the ship a lot easier to control as now the player doesn't need to fight against as much momentum to change directions when they want to.
Second, have more control over enemy spawns and behaviour. Always have the same enemies spawn at the same time in a wave so that the player knows what to expect. Make it that the worms will always travel a set distance out from the right before they dash forward instead of this being completely random (Sometimes they'll go half way across the screen before they finally dash and sometimes they'll never reach a quarter of the way across before they do). Also, give the worms less health so that they're way easier to kill. Like, it should be that they take no more than 3 hits with the starting gun and that by the second upgrade the player is killing them in one hit. This would compensate not only for how hard they are to hit but for how hard they can be to dodge when they're in packs (which they almost always are). It should be that players are attempting to wipe them out quickly instead of having to try and dodge them, but between their small size and the small projectiles this would only be possible if they're really weak. Later in the game you can introduce stronger variants to have them still remain a challenge.
Third, make it that the player only needs to get within a certain range for star dust and gem collectables to be drawn to the ship. This will make it easier for the player to collect these without excessive risk. Also, put in a star dust banking system where after every wave, a certain portion of star dust is stored away and can't be lost if the player dies. This would give the player the ability to make some progress on upgrades if they so happen to have a lot of bad luck.
These are the primary ways I think that this could be improved to make the player experience better and to make the gameplay loop stronger. Other things I commented on, like the low rate of star dust and the fact that gem rocks hurt you, wouldn't even matter if these things were done as those issues would be dealt with by executing the above ideas.