the art is pretty, and sadly thats all i can say for this game. the mechanics are none, the shot type is confusing and nothing is explained, theres no health or bombs (how??? did you build this game from the ground up instead on a existing bullet hell engine???). and worst part is sadly the biggest. the attack patters are just fast projectile spam. they repeat patterns and its just unsatysfying even if you dodge anything because you dont know whats going on ever. everything is too fast, the respawn barely clears any bullets since the enemies are constantly shooting fast projectiles, you respawn immidiately almost, and new enemies come every few seconds. i dont even mean to complain about difficulty since you can face tank every boss in the game but its all just really unenjoyable. i do hope the game gets better though.
I think you’re a bit hung up on the “existing base” part which i kind of kept short in description; the engine is actually just 7 days old and is a refactor from previous jam which has messier code.
When the jam started the engine ONLY have bullet and rudimentary stage sequence system, and rough dialogue system (still inefficient from old system). Healths, Lives, Continue, Scoring, Ending, Menu, Settings, etc didn’t exist at the time, with Scoring and Ending page being last minute addition in last 2 hours. Death is also added mid jam; previously there isn’t even dying.
The repetition also come from the fact I was refactoring the entire stage script system mid jam as well, if somehow code is dug each 3 section has entirely different scripting system, first using velocities, second using lerps, third using Tweening. So 90% of the complaint is more of a result of the fact I was still working on engine DURING the jam lol
I realize that it sound strange since some of the feature should be pretty fundamental and higher priority; this is because this refactor is more of a coding project side in terms of organizing game architecture so that it have long term maintainability and can be extended by other people for their purposes (it’s open source atm, or planned to), so the focus was put higher on architecture heavy side such as Scripting and Dialogue event sequencing. Theoretically if eventually I had to make custom mechanic like Shoot the Bullet for example it should be very easy to modify, etc.
(also I think you meant to comment in the jam page not here lol)