The healthbar and playing area being conencted and increasing/decreasing in size is so incredibly clever and honestly really enhances the gameplay, kinda wishing more shootemups did this now! The style is also really cool and the moment the squares spawned one after the other around me in a circle was dope as shit, awesome job!!!
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Very nice to find these cool moments, the decision to make the arena smaller was a random thought that appeared when I said "I don't wanna have lives or a health bar, how can I make an alternate failure mode?". It felt really intense (so, fun!) when I started testing so I knew it would stick.
The spawning was another fortunate accident actually, I did that so the enemies wouldn't all shoot in sync when a wave started (the sound was very off). It ended up giving the player more time to react to what was coming and makes for a really nice "wave spawn" animation.
All in all, it was playtesting a bunch that helped me find the fun, just like Mark recommends.