So I like the concept, but along with my praise I have some critiques which I'll get through first before saying what I did enjoy about this.
Firstly the controls felt like they were fighting themselves a little, the game in the beginning is slow and floaty, which made aiming next to impossible when combined with the spinning mechanic. This would normally be evened out by a faster spin mechanic, which would promote a kind of spray and pray early game, but the spinning felt really slow as well. I feel if you make one of these two faster in the beginning, the beginning would be easier to get through.
I thought the space dust were also obstacles for my first death until I accidentally ran into one and realized that's how I would shoot. That would normally be something added in a sort of guide which I saw you say that you didn't have enough time to implement so I won't be holding that critique too hard. I also saw on death you had to reload the page to respawn, which is a little odd. I'm going to assume that means you're new to Godot, and would recommend looking up how to swap between scenes. In a real emergency where you don't have time to implement something better, you can just load a scene on death by doing...
get_tree().change_scene_to_file(<scene_path_from_filesystem_here>) # Changes to a designated scene
get_tree().reload_current_scene() # Reloads the current scene
This changes the scene to whatever the path designated inside is instantly. If my description isn't enough, I highly recommend looking up a video on scene switching, and re spawn systems. They're not too difficult and make a world of difference during development.
Now, all of that being said, once I got some upgrades I really liked what you put together, the 4 different dust types of water, ice, fire, and the normal was an interesting system that allowed for unique builds during the mid-game. There was a nice variety of enemies that, while getting outpaced very quickly, did bring something different to the table. There were a ton of unique upgrades, and even though I think some of them scale far too quickly (like xp bonus going from 2x to 4x and quickly reaching 10x to 20x), they made for an interesting endgame. I would have liked to see the enemies get stronger over time but that likely was out of your time budget.
The amount of things you DID wind up adding is fairly impressive for your first itch publish, modular upgrades for one in your card system is usually something people wouldn't tackle until their third or fourth test project, and you added quiet a lot of them to be honest. Not only that but they played alongside each other nice enough instead of being completely separate things. I'd say the only things this game is missing is audio of course, a slight bit of polish and some stronger game feel, otherwise known as "juice". Overall still a solid entry, and I still enjoyed playing it!
Viewing post in Meteor Shower jam comments
I agree the movement is too slow in the beginning. I think I just played the game so much that I got really good at it, and no one ever playtested it so I thought it was fine lol. During 90% of the development, the movement was much faster. Only when I added the card system at the end did I make the movement and rotation super slow to give you something to upgrade. I def should have tested it more. Same thing with the card scaling. I 100% agree that they are way too overpowered too quickly. I literally just threw in random exponential formulas for most of the upgrades and had no time to test any of them! If I had an extra few hours to work on the game so many of the kinks, like XP and damage cards going to 2x immediately, would have been ironed out! My philosophy was that I wanted everything to scale by 2x every 60 seconds, so I made all of the cards reflect that. However, with the enemy scaling, they do scale, it's just... I uploaded the game to itch, playtested it, said "this is too hard", and in my frantic 30 minutes left scramble, I removed the health scaling on enemies. I said I'd rather have an easy game than one that's brutally difficult. Due to this, once you reach a certain point, you just one shot everything and gain levels instantly. And the entire 2x scaling premise completely falls about. Sigh, I guess balancing a survivor-like is more complex than 2^x lol.
As for it having a lot of features, I think it's mainly just because I have a lot of experiencing programming already as both a hobby and as a cs student at university, and also I have already made a few tiny little games in pure java and c. This is just my first time working with a game engine and actually uploading it to itch. I wish the balancing was better so there would be more opportunities to view the elemental reactions and inflections!
Thinking the space dust is obstacles is so funny! I never would have imagined that! I'm sure I could fix this by changing the dust textures to be more... Idk... Dusty? More like the particles in slither.io if you've played that
Thanks for the tips about how to reset the game. The reason I didn't add anything is because I ran out of time, and the thing that controls all of your stats is an autoload, and I had no idea how to reset it (and I didn't want to / have time to manually write a function for it lol). Do those functions you sent reset autoloads? I kinda doubt it, so in the future I guess I shouldn't use autoloads for the something like this.
Anyways I'm glad you had some fun with the game, and I thank you for the feedback and lengthy review :)
No they won't reset autoloads, only the current scene, you would have to do that manually. Also yes I wouldn't recommend using autoloads for this, personally I would use something called "Resources" which are perfect for modular upgrade systems, a good tutorial on how to implement them in this way can be found here on YouTube. It might be a little hard to completely revamp that system using a more complex method so worst case scenario some spaghetti code can help you by just saving all the default values in the autoload and resetting them through a function in the autoload to be called in your death function before reloading the scene. Again this is bad practice but hey whatever gets the game made!