Hello my friend, you are doing a fantastic job on your new (work in progress) project. I love seeing people bring dedication into a project fulled by their self passion for creation. As for said project, I love the top down shooter game-play you have going for yourself, truth is, it can be difficult to make such game-play/controls feel good. You have established a decent foundation for your games game play loop and I wanted to share my opinions on how you can improve on the experience. For starters, the sprite work is fantastic and can be very appealing to a broad audience. You have great animations so far for how early your game is development wise. There are some things I think can be improved on/ added to this already great project. As for mechanics I think your game could benefit with a look ahead/zoom out mechanic similar to that seen in Hotline Miami. In Hotline Miami the camera is tied to the mouse cursor and when you press a button your maximum sight line is extended with the downside of your movement being capped. This would be beneficial as you would better be able to seek out enemy's outside of your current view. I also think making the enemy's/projectiles quicker would make the chaos of the game feel more eventful and I think this would go good in combination with a dash mechanic. On the topic of weapons, I believe that the shotguns fire rate should be slower because currently it is only slightly slower than the common assault rifle, I also think the individual pellets should be more powerful. The minigun is overpowered, I think the best way to remedy this is to make the minigun a temporary power up that lasts a limited time, I love how the weapon makes you feel powerful but such power should be limited as to keep the challenge of the current game. I think the game would benefit from a high damage sniper rifle so you can pick off individual enemy's from a distance. Now I would like to talk about future game "juice" ideas, I believe enemy damage should feel more impact maybe with hit particles and a damage flash, I also believe the enemy's death should be more vibrant. I think the player should be given a North and a South facing sprite for a better sense of directionality. Please don't take any of my suggestions as criticisms, I don't want to taint your vision for the future of your project as this game needs to be manufactured from your personal choices or else it was never yours to begin with. Overall, I can't overstate how good of a job you are doing with your current project and I can't wait to see what you bring to your game that makes it independent from those like it. I will be keeping tabs, best of luck!
-Dylan Griffey