hello, thanks for the compliments :) and yeah, it has been a bit jarring to me how many people have been talking about the difficulty when i didn't even intend for this game to be hard in the first place😭(well maybe other than the last level of the stage).
as no one on the team complained about it during development so i though it was fine, but i failed to realize that all of us were, at the very least, decent enough at the game to survive for quite a bit. so there wasn't as much consideration to what the experience was like to someone who would die a lot in the game, which also feeds into the why i didn't prioritize a restart button and a proper game over screen as much as i should have perhaps.
well it's a handy lesson to keep in mind for next years jam at least :)