Thank you thank you. The Visual and Sound folks (lilchokedout and Virginia Leo, respectively) were on absolute demon time this jam. It was an immense pleasure to work with them. Pijinguy did fantastic design work writing up the attack patterns though the final implementation was me.
The timer going offscreen was a point of discussion within our team. It was an early decision I made to maximize the screen space during the player actions for future enemy movement patterns, but I decided to keep it offscreen for other secondary effects. The main inspiration was Balatro. I wanted to add some more noise with the decision to collect bonuses or play it safe. The reason it peeks out was intended to stress the player out some more. (Ack! My timer is still running down!) Hidden trackable information isn't everyone's taste, and I should probably have committed harder one direction or another rather than the middle ground with the timer shake there is now.
Yeah the projectile collision is janky. The primitive used there is just a rectangular sprite, so when they're rotated and not axis aligned, the collision can get noisy.
The arrow buttons spin from the perspective of the car moving and not the player (imagine the car on a microwave dish and the arrows spinning the dish) The code got messy enough that when I tried changing it to spin from the player pov, it didn't work, so alas it was another victim of the time crunch (along with more enemy movement patterns 😭😭😭