Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!
An entry we've often had in Feedback Quest events is Feisty Fauna, a game that plays exactly like this. However, where that was in made using 3D graphics, this uses some cute pixel art. I love these types of survivor games, and the design of this one is pretty great. Yet it's not without flaws that could be fixed. I'm going to break my feedback down into different categories, starting with abilities.
First and foremost, I feel like the player should have a lot more control over the starting Fork weapon. I find trying to get your first couple of levels to be really difficult because of how random the fork is. Instead of the somewhat random direction it has now, it should always be thrown in the direction of the closest enemy. I know it doesn't do this because I'd have an enemy RIGHT behind me while the game is throwing forks in every direction BUT towards that one enemy that is literally only 20 pixels away from me. I'm fine with additional forks being more random, but that first fork should be set up to work with the player.
Next, I think that all abilities should be clear in how they work. While some abilities clearly state how they attack (ketchup and hot sauce for example), others are far less clear. The skewers don't state how they choose their targets and the flames don't say that they always fire in the direction you're facing. During my very first run, I chose Fire early thinking it would be good, only to then have the enemies that come at the 1 minute mark essentially screw me over because I couldn't risk moving towards them due to how many their were and how close they were at all times, which in turn really delayed me from getting levels early on.
With the knife ability, I feel that the first time you upgrade this it should always be set on the opposite side of the first knife. Then when you get a third knife, the positions should be adjusted to keep them equal distance apart. This should then repeat for each additional knife.
I also think there may be a bug in the Chef's Hat upgrade. The Chef's Hats states that it increases the number of attacks fired by 1/2. However, what I found that if I got the first Chef's Hat upgrade BEFORE getting the Knife, it didn't automatically add another knife. Yet I know (or at least have seen) that the Chef's Hat is supposed to affect the Knife as I would often end up with 5 knives by the time I got all of the Knife upgrades, even though each level up of the Knife only adds one. Yet other abilities don't have this problem: in a run where I got the first Chef's Hat very early, I found that every other ability I got after that still got the additional shot from the Chef's Hat. It's just the Knife that's broken for this.
With the ability stuff out of the way, I want to move into things regarding player movement and control.
First, if the player stops moving, the character will always face forward regardless of whatever direction they were going. This can make it confusing which way the Fire attack is going to go. I recommend having idle sprites for all direction to better indicate this.
Next, I found a lot of hit boxes to just be vastly unfair to the player. Just about all survivor games that operate in a 2D space tend to make the player avatar small to make this more fair, but the rabbit in this game is huge. Adding into the fact that many of the enemies are also huge, and suddenly you have things like the player getting hurt because they're feet touch the very top pixels of the giant broccoli men who appear later in a run. This just gets vastly unfair for the player, resulting in them taking a lot of damage that they otherwise would've avoided in other games like this. The hit box issue then came up again during the boss in my last run. Late into the fight, the boss fires a volley of carrots in a cone pattern (it could be circular but I can't see the entire thing). Depending on where I am in the field, this becomes either trivial to dodge or just outright impossible. In my case, it learned more to impossible. If you're in the direct north or south during this attack, you have a lot less pixels to be hit which, in turn, makes it easier to squeeze through the carrots. If you're in the direct east or west, though, you now have the entire bunny's height to deal with. Even at the very edge of the arena, you either can't dodge this or only have a pixel or two of room to do so. The best way to fix this is to make the rabbit's hitbox be a square set in the middle of the rabbit. That way, things that graze the feet or ears won't count as hits.
Last in this topic, I was originally going to ask for there to be a dash option so players have some more they can do in the game besides "move and choose upgrades," and to get them some agency in trying to avoid enemies. Then I eventually learned that you can find a dash upgrade out in the field. So instead, this bit has been changed to... make the dash available by default. It shouldn't be an upgrade I have to find in the field, especially considering other aspects I'll be covering later in this feedback.
This brings me to the last category, which is basically things that I didn't think fit into the previous two.
First, it took me a while to realize that you can get healing items in trees. I would highly recommend putting something in that tells the player that these can heal them. Similarly, I eventually discovered there was an upgrade in the field that allowed you to passively regenerate health. Personally, I think this is just a very overpowered item. Instead of this, what I would suggest is that the player recovers some health every time they get an upgrade. I would also suggest they recover a portion of their health once they reach the boss. That way, a player who is only one hit away from death won't die instantly to the boss.
Next, I honestly found the arena to be way too big. At no point during the 5 minutes leading to the boss did I ever reach the edge of the arena. This can then make finding upgrades on the field a matter of pure luck as it they spawn far away, you'll likely never find them. I don't know how big the arena is (again, I never reached the edge), but I would say it should be at least 50% smaller. If you're worried about it being too easy for players to find multiple upgrades, just reduce the range where they're shown that an upgrade is nearby.
So I know that the way the game works is you have 5 minutes to get as many levels as you can before fighting the boss, but I personally found that the game scales too hard early on. This goes back to what I was saying about the Fork weapon, but I constantly found that I just did not have enough weapons early enough to deal with the enemies that appear in the first minute. Instead, once the one minute mark hit I often found I would only get one more level during the next entire minute because the enemies suddenly became so beefy that I couldn't kill them while the weaker enemies just stopped coming. An improved starting fork can help this, but I think the real thing that needs to happen is that the scaling for enemies should be changed, with the first new enemies having less health. Otherwise, all the player can do is spend over a minute just slowly bleeding off lots of enemies, then sweep around and get so many items that they get multiple levels at once and suddenly go from being too weak to being too strong not just for the current enemies, but for the next set of enemies too.
And this brings me to my last point... WHY AM I FINDING MORE THAN ONE BABY CORN?! WHY ARE BABY CORNS SPAWNING IN AREAS I ONCE KNEW DIDN'T HAVE ONE?! I DON'T WANNA KILL THE BABY CORN, YET IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO THIS! STOP MAKING ME A MONSTER!
That's all from me! I can't wait to see more! :D