A big thanks to everything who voted, rated, commented and told me how I screwed up!  XD  I'm working on a update that I will put up as a separate submission.  Expect palette updates, minor layout updates, a few small bug fixes and most of the suggestions that were posted below.

Very smooth controls. Excellent variety in enemies, both in terms of appearance and behavior. Good pacing and escalation of difficulty.

Superb visuals, including the ships and the backgrounds.

A couple of very small nitpicks:

1. The music is catchy, but at times got very "noisy."

2. I couldn't tell what all the power ups did.

3. I didn't see a health bar for the boss--did I miss it?

Solid and polished little shmup game! Fantastic job :)

You made a complete, well-balanced, beautifully illustrated, masterfully soundtracked, and addictively fun shoot-em-up game in ten days. Congratulations! Bravo!

My one note is that there could be an option to turn off the hard flash effects (the saucer and dumbbell enemies, the "destroy all" flash, the flash on the "select weapon" cursor, etc.).

Saw the progress for this one in the Discord for the game jam, and I have to say it plays as good as it looks! I like the good use of the screen's limited resolution, and the gameplay feels snappy and polished overall. The music's good as well.

EDIT: forgot to mention! The fact this was created with a bespoke game engine makes this 10x cooler!

Hello.  Thanks again for the comments, everyone.  I have been looking at the suggestions that have been presented and I think there will be a few updates to the game once the jam is over.  Most of my work (lately) has been on the custom resource editor I used to help make this game.  I noted a few weaknesses when trying to work with a greyscale palette, so I have been making some updates and improvements to it before anything else.  

I would also like to an include an option to select from a number of pre-made palettes in the options page.  Depending on your hardware performance, it may take a second or so to update the game since every pre-rendered sprite sheet has to be re-drawn with the updated palettes.

Pretty solid Shmup. Good job.

Very solid shmup!

Enemies and bosses could use some damage feedback (blinking, color cycling, etc.), but overall this is a very well presented and polished game. Congrats!!

INSANE GAME

A great gameboy schmup with a large variety of levels, enemies, and patterns. Great job!! Only thing I would love is laser sound effects (I love hearing a constant pew pew)

A very solid Shoot Em Up, especially for emulating a Gameboy style. Aside from the lack of colour making it difficult to tell certain elements apart (which of course you can’t really do anything about on the Gameboy), my only real issues with the game are that a lot of the difficulty did come from the player’s larger than normal hitbox and the lack of telegraphing on enemy movement and boss attacks. It was also a bit difficult to tell when the player actually took damage, since the only feedback appears to be the flashing of the shield/ship bars (a unique sound would’ve been handy).

I wish I had a GameBoy to play this on it! Amazing atmosphere, great art and sounds that make for a good composition. I sometimes felt like there could be more going on both visually and in audio layer, but maybe the GameBoy soul is bound to simplicity. I also like the little details like ships rotation with individual sprites. 5/5 Good job! 

Very cool old school arcade action!

love shumps! one of my favorites!

Thank you to everyone who has left feedback and ratings.  I appreciate the details when people tell me what is good and what can be improved.

This is so good. I don't even play shmups but this was great. Both graphics and music are top notch. There's so much variety between weapons and powerups. It's just really good, good job!

very authentic to the gb and nails all the shmup basics in a tiny package. reminds me a lot of guxt!

Best game I've played so far! I went in blind so I beat the entire thing without realizing there was a speed boost key, and I used up my first lovebomb by accident while trying to pause the game, but the gameplay and graphics and music all felt so smooth and professional I could have easily seen this as a full game for sale in stores! And it fit the gameboy aesthetic perfectly, I can imagine playing it on a real gameboy - the only difference I can think of is that this game lags way less than a gameboy would, haha. 

The only possible critique I could have is that a pause menu would have been nice, even if it just brought up a black screen that said "PAUSED". Was watching a stream while playing, so I would have liked to pause so I could reply to something every now and then, but had to settle for between stages and during any brief mid-stage pauses. (Edit: Oh wait there is a pause button, it's just on ESC which is so out of the way I didn't think to press it. Maybe Enter would have been a better choice?)

PS: Fun fact, when first trying to find which button started the game, I somehow hit a weird key combination that shut down my entire browser. Oops. Also, I was weirdly happy to see another game that both used the default palette and had a screen resizing option! I'm not alone in that!

An amazing shooter! Unfortunately I would need too much time to see the entire content, but from what I've seen, it it awesome! I would like to have had a game over music and personally, a control set where the left hand is the movement as in the handheld.