Thanks for playing! I definitely made it too difficult, or at least too swingy, the early-game--until you've got a decent weapon--is far too hard.

I experimented with having the walls collideable but it made the movement much more difficult and made dodging frustrating so I ditched it. Also, getting enemies to collide in an intelligent way with the walls didn't sound like a trivial addition! :)

Thanks for playing. I want to make lots of adjustments to the balance in a future revision. Beam weapons do seem good, I admit, but there are some ludicrous missile weapons you can pick up if you're lucky (see below, yes that's a boss wiped out in less than a second :S). The weapons are far too swingy at the moment. A lot of it can come down to just getting lucky with weapon drops.

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I was really happy with the movement, even if you're getting loads of hits you still feel all agile and nimble. :)

Thanks for playing. It sounds like you just got unlucky with the missiles, I think generally they're overpowered (see below :)). It depends on what ship you choose too, the Renegade is far better with beams whereas the Reaver is the missile specialist.

Glad you appreciated it! The sector map can be a little opaque in terms of where enemies pop up and maybe where the player can move but it's mainly just a way to get the player to plot a path towards the boss(es). With the upgrade menu, again, it's more a failure of communication, the weapons aren't really all that complicated, it's only really damage and cooldown that matter most of the time. The upgrade menu was an important but very late addition, so it's kind of messy. I'm sort of pleased in a way that I landed on the 'too complicated' side because I was worried whether a shmup would come across as too simplistic and not Rogue-like enough :)

Thanks for giving it a try! I think there's a lot of room for experimentation in the shmup genre and I've been thinking about having a shmup with a strategy map/overworld for a while.

The upgrade screen was the last major element I added to the game and it's a bit of a mess, so you're not alone in finding it hard to understand, there's quite a few weapon stats listed that aren't all that important compared to 'damage' and 'cooldown'. I was in full 'just get it working' mode by that point :)

It looks like Itch double-posted your comment (it's been doing that to me a lot too) so I deleted the duplicate. :)

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks! I was surprised at how straightforward the graphics were to make. I was worried that it'd be harder to make good sprites.

Cheers, yeah I was trying to make the UI look like computer readouts. It's always fun making music on Pico-8, that was one of the first things I got locked in, to set the mood for how I wanted everything else to be.

Thanks! I wasn't sure how well the Rogue-like-ness would land, I spent the last couple of days trying to dial up the references to Rogue, like the little chat log when you defeat an enemy etc. It was my first attempt at making a game with a very limited colour palette, I think I need to make a few adjustments to which things get highlighted in pink to help them stand out.

Thanks, I was surprised at how straightforward it was working with the limited palette, it actually made creating sprites a lot easier. I probably did go a bit overboard on some of the fake computer readout numbers (a lot of them are basically debug numbers that I just left in and repositioned.) I had been avoiding doing the upgrade menu all week because I knew what a nightmare it was going to be, so it was completely thrown together on the last day, hence the terrible layout :)

Glad you appreciated it! It was fairly late on in development when I gave the enemies and weapons names, but it helped make it clearer what was going on in the background in terms of each enemy having slightly different stats and behaviour. Four sectors is pretty good! I think I made the game far too hard, when I make some revisions to the game, the first thing I'm doing it lowering the difficulty :)

Haha thanks, I really enjoy working on Pico-8 and trying to keep up with what others can do on it. I've seen a few shmups being made on it lately that gave me some inspiration. :)