Hey! Wow, thank you very much as always for such generous feedback. It's much appreciated! And 90 kills, that's very impressive!
Completely agree some of those little touches such as visual/audio feedback could have used some more work. I found it tricky to make the pickups more obvious with such a low resolution for sure. There is a sound effect that plays when the spear tips break, but it's very similar to the sound effect for when you apply them, and gets lost amongst all the squelchy stab SFX so easily missed! I agree with all of your points though, especially about the hp/stamina bar. There were a few things I didn't feel were fully polished and that includes the perk system. Water originally had crocs to avoid and fish to hunt, which would have made the sprint in water perk a bit more important.
I gave the player the advantage when it comes to spear range, so that might be why it seemed a bit inconsistent, and the billboard sprites definitely confuse the sense of depth! Also the red hue is supposed to be black for enemy kills but I must have messed up the code somewhere on the flash effect without realising! Oops!
All really useful feedback and lots I'd like to improve on for a post-jam version.
And in answer to your questions:
1. Enemies have two states (idle or chase) and a very primitive detection zone based on distance to toggle between the two states. They're randomly assigned either the player or another enemy as their target and then an alarm goes off every second or so to check who they were last hit by - the player, a dog or another enemy which allows them to change target. And then some enemies will spawn in the 'chase' state to make things a bit more random, and means they'll randomly fight each other without the player getting involved, which I thought was cool! In the same alarm they're also swapping between an attack or block state. They'll only block when their target is attacking and only attack if they're within a certain distance to their target. The range and priority of attack vs. block is also randomised so you get some enemies who are blocking masters and others who just go nuts trying to stab you.
I think it would be good to add some more states in future, such as fleeing when low on health, or dodging instead of just blocking half the time.
2. There are invisible spawners all about the arena which will only spawn enemies if the purge isn't active, the spawner is behind the fog and the total enemy count is below a certain amount. So they're basically spawning out of sight, but it won't ever spawn too many. Then they'll stop spawning during the purge to give the impression that everyone is being killed off by the dogs!
I hope that helps, and thanks very much for playing!