There's something to be said about games that deliberately choose to avoid complex art and go into the abstract representation. I am a fan of leaning into putting your time and efforts into the gameplay. The gameplay is fine, the tree looks like it could be promising once further developed, and the general feel of the game is satisfying. I would love to see this developed further, so let me give you some feedback of things that I ran into:
1. The way you have the start of the game set up can be improved. Your best aim is to kill the green things, so I'd say they would be the entry enemy to chase and kill. You should make it more abundant so you don't die at the start without having made any money. Ofcourse this would make it so that you acquire money a bit easier at the start, so you'd have to increase the prices a bit. This is general game balancing and usually out of scope for a Jam, so it's understandable this isn't perfect right now, but I hope you will put time into this
2. When firing your laser you seem to have to be pretty accurate. This provides a nice and fun challenge to younger, more capable individuals, as they will have less of a problem with it. To cater to a slightly older, and less-capable audience it's usually a good thing to make the collider box of an enemy sightly bigger than it's model, so that very-close misses would actually be counted as a hit. This way you take into account the decreased capacity to react of parts of your audience.
3. Progression isn't saved. It's easy to add a small package that can keep track of save states for you. If you use unity I
can recommend "Easy Save - The Complete Save Game & Data Serializer System" as it's very easy-entry.
4. Your music is an irregular pattern of notes. If this is all you hear it becomes annoying quick. Add some stable, rhythmic percussion that the listener can "ride" on while enjoying the melody.
5. Even though you have the countdown big in the screen, for some reason I didn't understand why I was dying some times at the start because I was so focussed on evading the enemies. This is a good problem to have! Apparently I felt so immersed that even that big countdown slipped by me being so focussed on other parts of your game. I'd propose you add the reason of death to your death-screen.
6. Some nice fading transitions betweens screens would go a long way.
7. After playing for about 15 mins I encountered a bug where I heard the dying sound, but I still had 3.01 on the timer (Maybe I ran out of health? It was after touching an enemy). The game really slowed down, but the death screen didn't appear, which basically bricked my game and I couldn't get out of state state. There is no ESC-menu or something I can do to end the current run, so I had to refresh and then I lost all my progress.
Great job on your game dude. Really enjoyed it!
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Thank you really from the bottom of my heart for taking your time to write such a detailed response.
Originally my idea was to make the enemies unlockable by a skill tree but i scrapped it up for some reason, maybe for the better. As you said i did not have enough or to be exact i did not dedicate enough time to the balancing and looking back to it now i really regret it.
Regarding the music, i do not have any experience making it but i also decided to give it a try and made one myself, so of course it was horrendous and also i created a bug last minute before submitting that reset the music after death which was in order to fix another issue. Due to that i also removed a great clock ticking sound when running out of time. Most people probably did not notice but i have a toggle music button in the top right screen of the upgrade tree.
Unfortunately i was not able to pin point the cause of the softlock before the jam (at that point i hadn't even experienced it both in the editor and in the web). It is really sad that so many people would have kept playing and enjoying the game but instead it leaves them frustrated.
Number 2. and 3. 5. and 6. are definitely great things to add and thank you for your suggestions.
And again thank you so much for taking your time to write suggestions and improvements! I might continue this game, probably make it a mobile game or try to put it up in a website like crazy games or poki.
oh no dude don't regret anything. Even mistakes wwill eventually give you thee conviction to change something and be more confident about how things turn out.
Add me on discord (peppa.chan). Next Jam or game you'll make I would love to playtest it and help you brainstorm/consider the things that would improve the playability with you. I'll help you with the music too.
Great job, great submission.