Hello!
I always look forward to your walls of text, I'll respond to your paragraphs in a stream of consciousness of my own:
Wow starting with challenge level 4 is an insane choice lmao, I'm proud of you but also goddamn you're a trooper.
I feel like I kinda phoned it in for the music this time. I'm more proud of my previous 3 games' music, I think for this game's music I just wanted something that fit the mood. Same for SFX, I was originally going light on SFX cause I wanted to write a boss battle track (and needed the extra pico 8 space), but decided at the end to skip that. This ended up making the game light on SFX in general (enemies have no 'chargeup' sound before their shots, and most of them don't have a 'shoot' sound).
Falling off platforms due to recoil is something that happened to me a lot while playtesting, I think if I ever expand on this game, I'll probably prevent recoil from knocking you off a platform.
Sorry about the enemies all looking alike, I didn't put a ton of work into the enemy designs.
On the topic of enemy distribution: The game on Normal mode has handcrafted enemy encounters (each spawn is designed to be harder/different than the last enemy set). However, on Challenge level 1 and above, the game adds a random chance to spawn additional enemies. I got kinda lazy with designing this mechanic, so it ends up just being: It adds a chance to spawn a basic bat or a shooter bat randomly at the start of each wave.
That's why some levels feel randomly more difficult: you may have just gotten unlucky with more shooter bats being spawned due to challenge level 1+ (if you play on normal, the difficulty curve is a lot smoother). Sorry about that!
On scaling pixel art: This was definitely out of laziness on my part. I definitely had room in my spritesheet for some 16x16 enemies, but I really wanted to make this a smaller project so I just scaled up the boys and called it a day. I feel you on scaling pixel art, in most of my more recent games, I'm a little more of a purist with keeping resolutions the same, but I do think there's some humor to scaling pixel art. Like the big slime boss just looks so big and goofy with his thick-ass lines, I can't not love him.
For the hitboxes: I think I definitely agree, I usually make hitboxes a lot smaller than visuals, but for this game I'm pretty sure I just made them roughly the same size as the visuals, which gives you a lot fewer "can't believe I dodged that" moments. In the future / possible expansion, I'll stick with more player-friendly hitboxes.
Woof the final boss was tough to fit in the token limit. I wish I had room to add trails / some way of showing where the boss will go, but even the teleport animation was pushing the token limit. Same goes for the ending screen, I originally had a small story written about some "Putrid curse" that trapped you in the crypt, but didn't have room for cutscene code or anything.
Thanks for playing on CL4, impressed that you chose that first!
Also, thanks for the words about TRYH4RD and my style. I've been feeling a lot better about gamedev more recently, I think I've finally gotten my creative process and style fleshed out. I really like making difficult games, and I love that players (like you) care enough about my games to push through the high difficulty. Dreams of D4RK is probably the hardest game I'll ever make (even though it's unfinished) haha, I like the difficulty level of my more recent games a little more. Planet D4RK is coming out on ArmorGames on Monday Feb 14th, so I hope the folks there like it as much as TRYH4RD!
Thanks for playing and for all the feedback! Also I don't think I've officially done a CL5 run, shh don't tell anyone.