Yep, the background and the collectibles are 2 things that do need a major revamp. I'm thinking a full revamp of how the bg works (semi-monochromatic shmups like this ought to have a simpler bg really), and as regards the petals to make them stand out a bit more by both adding a white outline to them as well as making the player attract them if they're near them. Thanks for the feedback, I'm def planning on a 1.1 of the game!

All fair points. I was balancing the game out after basically a day of continuous devving lol, so the stuff I decided to implement last minute like difficulty scaling over time was a bit busted. Originally, the enemies would spawn at closer to the rates you see at the start of the game and nothing else, so that influenced their hp pool quite a bit.

A lot of the dissonant art stuff you see in the game is the result of overreliance on in-engine colouring and image blending over adherence to the palette due to trying to make everything look alright while being pressed for time

As regards clarity of the upgrade buying option I was so mushbrained at the end of it of it all that I was going to implement a simple "-(number of petals you lost)" draw call whenever you picked it up, but I was just too exhausted

That's very fair. I wanted to make the game a bit more of a very casual, easily understandable SHMUP so I did away with things like visible player hitbox, focus mode, etc. Replacing the missing bullet hell stuff with some acceleration on the player controls is a great idea.

I'm very likely to make a 1.1 due to how quick and simple it would be to improve so many things in the game, so I'll be definitely be implementing that + a bunch of other quality of life features.