itch.io

Hah, we've definitely fallen into the ol' juice on the backburner trap before .
But I've come to realize for almost every game it's the most important factor, at least IMO. Doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you cant sell them to the player, yknow? And the thing is that it doesn't have to take that much effort, just decently punchy sfx and some screenshake in the right places is 10x better than nothing. Most difficult part is probably just knowing where to put juice when the mechanics havent solidified yet , but I think that's part of getting good at jams.
But I'll admit , I didn't really play long enough to really get into it, mainly because it was genuinely a bit frustrating not having any feedback for what I was doing. So I didn't feel encouraged to try again when I first died early on.
The only thing that seemed to change when collecting powerups was the sprite of the projectiles, which doesn't really register as much of anything happening. And also feels like its just replacing the previous thing instead of building stuff up. I imagine the balance for this kind of progression is pretty tricky to do well though. 
So don't get discouraged, and keep pushing🐱‍👤