Have a lot of feedback for this one! I actually quite enjoyed this, so don’t take it as me railing on the game, but there were a lot of small low-hanging fruit for improvement. And sounds like you’re working on a post-jam, so hope some of it is helpful!

The game has a really satisfying core loop of killing enemies, collecting their juice, and spending it on neat upgrades to get progressively more powerful. The upgrades were varied, and behaved differently for ranged and melee ships, so there was a lot of variety.

I do think more variety in enemy design could help here though; most of the enemies were relatively weak, but came in large numbers, so the best builds were almost always more bullets, more pierce, and more AoE. A few enemy types that were big tanks could incentivize single-target damage more, or some enemies with shields on one side that can only be attacked from the back to incentivize maneuverability, or enemies that move fast and hit hard but are squishy to add variety.

I do think in general your bullets could travel a lot faster. Slow-moving projectiles rarely make that much of a mechanical difference, but feel a lot worse to play with, especially if your ship moves close to the speed of their projectiles (it looks like you had some randomness to projectile speed, but I could definitely race the lowest rolls there with my ship). Can’t recommend enough watching The Art of Screenshake which is definitely the most impactful 45 minutes of education in my entire time making games. Feel free to also look at how the faster projectile speed in my entry makes the weapons feel.

Here’s a list of other (relatively minor) things that would be really quick to fix but help a lot:

• Make the shop wait until the end of a dash to appear, or keep dash velocity. When dashing, you’re almost always collecting XP in the middle of a horde of enemies, and it feels bad when you level up and it cancels your dash and strands you in the middle to take a bunch of damage.
• Prevent getting duplicate upgrades on the upgrade screen
• Make the damage indicators for enemies drift up a little, or move in a random direction, or appear in a slightly random position. As-is it’s hard to tell whether you land one or multiple hits since the indicators are on top of each other.
• Add an indicator for dash/projectile radius, like a glow or particle effect. This makes it easier to get used to the spacing of it without having to experiment nearby enemies.
• Add more obvious visuals for dashing. Especially with the brawler, it was hard to tell when the dash was over and thus hard to gauge the distance of the dash. Adding an effect or change of color would help a lot. The guardian felt a lot better in this regard, since the speed boost was more obvious.
• Add more obvious visuals for taking damage. Especially for melee ships, it was sometimes hard to tell whether you took damage, or if you mis-spaced and took a little at the end of the dash. You might consider screenshake, flashing, particle effects, etc. You could even make the player take a lot more damage, but explode, killing nearby enemies and giving a bit of breathing room to escape.
• A nice-to-have would be a comparison of your current stats when taking upgrades. Saying “1 extra dash distance” is a lot less informative if you don’t know what your current stat is. Adding one to two is a big increase! Adding one to nine is less impactful.

I’ll also say that for a game jam game, I would make the extra characters more easy to unlock, or make it more obvious what the requirements are to unlock them. I would have loved to experiment with all of them to give more detailed feedback, but wasn’t sure what I needed to do (more play time? More games? More total enemies killed?). I would also generally only expect players to play your game for between 5 and 20 minutes and balance unlocks accordingly. I only ended up playing with generalist, brawler, and guardian. On a similar note, it would be nice if the runs took less time or scaled up more quickly in difficulty; all my runs ended because it felt like the difficulty stagnated, so I intentionally died to try a run with a new character.

Again, had a great time with the game, and most of these are minor details that might push the game to the next level. Great work on this in 48 hours, and would love to check out the post-jam version if you end up completing one!

I think that having a secondary mechanic (maybe something that requires you to stop, but deals more damage) would be nice. Game starts to become repetitive after a few upgrades.

As for the upgrades, I think that you should focus on adding changes to gameplay instead of just changing stats. For example:

• Add push back force
• Add option for bullets to pierce through certain number of enemies
• Dash ability
• Weapons (different shooting pattern)

basically, something that will require players to change their strategy and adapt to the game.

Pretty simple and polished game though. Well done!

It's oddly satisfying gradually become so powerful that everything just kind of dies when you breath on it. I liked the enemy spawn rate early on it felt pretty well balanced if you were trying to play more greedy.

One issue with giving every enemy chase AI is that you'll notice that they bunch up a lot and then the player will gravitate towards circle strafing that blob of enemies. One way to help mitigate this without having to introduce more enemy types is to give the enemies some push away factor from each other so they're less inclined to bunch up so heavily. You can look up boid flocking for a relatively simple way to introduce some spread.

I'd also maybe tone down the offensive upgrades since bullet count and penetration are basically stacking multipliers to your damage and can easily snowball the player DPS.

Played this for longer than I'd like to admit, the upgrades are quite rewarding :)! I think adding some variety to the enemies' behaviour would be great, perhaps an enemy that shoots or dashes at the player… I find fiddling with the physics of how an enemy moves can add a lot more character to them!
Good job on the game.

PS: If you tick the "Windows" checkbox in the game's uploads, it will make it possible to download the game through the Itch app!