I'm definitely thinking of patching in a checkpoint mechanic (and maybe just tallying deaths at the end). At this point even I am getting sick of dying to my game too often haha. To be frank almost all of the difficulty tuning happened at the last 2 or 3 days of the jam by which point I had lost track of how hard or easy my game was.
The controls infodump was there before I actually managed to create a proper tutorial, and I kind of just left it there tbh.
So I probably didn't explain the ammo stuff sufficiently, but basically there's two types of shots, default shot (large shot) which doesn't take ammo but does take your mana/time juice, and weapon pickup ammo (the HMG or heavy machine gun) that takes up actual ammo and also takes time juice but has a way faster firing rate. The default shot you can fire one at a time, but you can hold down fire on the HMG and it just fires a spread.
You're probably right about the shot spread, it's really meant to be used when you get right up in an enemy's face to burst their shield. I think I mainly added it to feel more like a machine gun, but a +10/-10 degree variance is a big factor when trying to hit enemies on the other side of the room.
Thanks for playing and your feedback! I think I will probably end up patching in a checkpoint system at some point at least, just so people can at least see the end of the game. A good point on making these things completable by jammers.