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I love this game in concept. There's a very intentional pace to it, where enemies take their time getting to you and you have advance warning, but you also have to take the time to turn and face them. It wasn't a fast-twitch game, but it was still intense because any mistake will be costly and there's no way to fix them. The difficulty modifiers are also awesome, and I really enjoyed the art style. (My game is also 1-bit, I just happen to love those kinds of visuals.)

I agree with other players' thoughts on the keybindings. 100%.

And while I figure you probably won't listen based on prior feedback, the game's difficulty curve is not in a great place right now. As much as I love the difficulty options provided, they don't fix the problem of the way it feels to play the game.

My feeling when playing the game was that if a missile appeared just a bit too counter clockwise of where I was aiming, if I had anything else on screen to shoot, I was just going to take damage. No way around it. When I lost health, I did not always feel like it was my fault. And whether I need to 'get good' or not, that *feeling* is not a good one for a game to create.

I don't think the player should turn in two directions. You could play with upping the rotation speed slightly (veeeery slightly) or further revising enemy attack patterns (though these are already really well done.)

But what I would recommend is that you just go a little easier in the early game so the player can grab some upgrades. If the player has a little more control over their playstyle via quick early upgrades, they are more likely to feel like it was their fault for not taking advantage of their choices well enough when they die.

Thank you so much for the comment!

Really glad to hear about the parts you enjoyed! Also you are totally right about the difficulty curve of the game. Basically I have a curated set of attack patterns that randomly get spawned. While additional tougher waves do get spawned after getting 2 modifiers, maybe I should have had a easier set for the time before any modifiers. As it stands now the difficulty curve is definitely weird, with one of the hardest  parts being  right at the start, and probably getting noticeably easier after the first modifier when it should be the opposite instead! But curating such sets, perfecting the rotation time  etc. are things that take a lot of time to create, playtest and balance. Working alone, I don't think that level of polish can reasonably be expected in a 7 day game jam, but maybe that's a skill issue :)

One area where I will disagree is, you mentioned that the feeling of dying not being your fault is a bad thing for a game to have. But I see it as a natural consequence of the genre of game. With roguelikes having random generation and permadeath, the chances of feeling that your of death was unfair, is sort of always there. It can definitely be mitigated through tuning, but like I said it was hard to do in this game, given the 7 day time. Also such instances are naturally there more often when you start playing, but reduce as you rack up more runs and gain more skill. And later as you get familiar with the exact mechanics, you get to know what works and what doesn't and once you know that, it gets harder to blame the game, and not yourself. Also games of a similar nature that generate similar emotions do go on to become very popular. Examples could be, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Downwell, Getting over it and maybe Hotline Miami. It's all a matter of execution,  which obviously would be poor for a jam game quickly scrapped together :)

Happy discuss this further if you want to...

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I always feel like it is my fault when I die in Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2, Downwell, and Enter the Gungeon. But I think we're saying the same thing.

When I died early on in these games, I did not know how to avoid it but felt like I could if I knew how, so I still did not blame the game.

Some of your patterns gave me the feeling that it was impossible to avoid at all. Still issue, probably, but the feeling was different for me.

I agree calibrating that skill curve in 7 days would be roughly impossible.

Edit: I agree with your skill curve analysis though