Thank you so much for your review! :)
I'm so glad you noticed the thought that went into the game's design. Yeah, getting closer to the boss was intentional. Initially I was thinking the spring would "gradually increase" as you kept fighting but the player could just stay at the back of the map and dodge which was super boring. So I forced them to move closer to the bullets to get the last bits, which naturally trends the level's difficulty higher, and added the flowers to again get the player to move around and dodge :^)
The amount of tiles thing--the "grass spreading" depends on the direction of your cursor so make sure it's not that. But if you did know that, then it most certainly sounds like some edge-case bug I didn't catch >_>
I added the sound effects in the last two days before the game was due 💀💀💀I just... completely forgot about the flowers. Making sounds or finding sounds was more of a challenge than I realized it would be.
Pressing Q to leave was a thing I considered but it trivialized the game. You can just hide from certain attacks instead of dodging. It would effectively be a shield and those are usually boring. This is the mechanic from this game I liked the reflect on the most. When designing, I needed attacks that COULDN'T be dodged so that the player is forced into a loop, so I thought "spam them with snowballs and make it so they have to bury themselves to dodge it" and at the time it's the best idea I could come up with. Since burying yourself is effectively free immunity, I wanted to discourage it unless it was used the way I wanted it to be used. My thought process was "Make it so it has a large problem, like not being able to prematurely leave, so that it's not used all the time" but that ended up backfiring spectacularly.
Some people suggested making it use energy but that wasn't a good idea either: The attacks aren't choreographed such that the player can remember "Oh, in a few seconds the blizzard attack will occur, let me remember to save energy so I can dig". I didn't want to rely on memorization and replaying the level to "memorize" when attacks occur.
If I updated this game, I wouldn't add a shovel; I would add a way to "parry" certain undodgeable attacks because that requires some kind of player input, is intentional, and the player would have to move to the parts of the attack that are parryable. Think "Cuphead", where only some attacks are parryable. Maybe by aiming the parry towards the enemy, it could, over time, stun them for a few seconds as a little reward. It complements the high-paced chaotic nature of the battles.
That's my 2-cents @_@. For my first attempt at designing a game I think I did well overall!
But yeah, thanks again for the amazing review. I love the work you guys did on Bear and Hunger :^)